West Bnegal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said the arrest of TMC national spokesperson Saket Gokhale by Gujarat Police smacked of vindictive attitude by the BJP, PTI reported.
“It’s a very bad, and sad (incident). Saket (Gokhale) is a bright man. He is very popular on social media. He has made no mistake,” Banerjee told reporters at Jaipur airport.
“I condemn this vindictive attitude. He (Saket) has been arrested because he tweeted against the Prime Minister. People also tweet against me… We are really feeling sorry about the situation,” she said
Gokhale was detained by the Gujarat Police from Rajasthan’s Jaipur on Monday night over a tweet about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Morbi, where a bridge collapse killed 136 people in October.
Gokhale recently tweeted a news clipping of a Gujrati newspaper that claimed that an RTI query revealed that the government had spent Rs 30 crore on Modi’s visit to Morbi after the bridge collapse incident. The news was flagged as “fake” by the government’s fact-check unit the same day.
The FIR was registered under Indian Penal Code Sections 465, 469, 471 (all pertaining to forgery) and 501 (printing or engraving matter known to be defamatory).
Soon after Gokhale’s detention, TMC leaders launched a tirade against the BJP, accusing it of “cooking up” the case.
“Fearless, Gokhale stood against the ruling dispensation that trades lives for its own profit. In reaction, panic-stricken @BJP4India got our national spokesperson @SaketGokhale arrested by Gujarat police. It is their (BJP’s) folly to think these acts of intimidation will make us (TMC) to bow down!,” tweeted Mamata’s nephew and TMC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.
TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh termed Gokhale’s “arrest” as “utterly disgraceful” and said that the act showed that the BJP was trying to build an “autocratic nation”.
TMC Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien gave the sequence of events leading to Gokhale’s detention while calling the case, filed with the Ahmedabad Cyber Cell, “cooked up”.
“Saket took a 9 pm flight from New Delhi to Jaipur on Monday. When he landed, Gujarat Police was at the airport in Rajasthan waiting for him and picked him up. At 2 am on Tuesday, he called up his mother and told her that they (Gujarat police) was taking him to Ahmedabad and he would reach there by noon today (Tuesday). The (Gujarat) police let him make that two-minute call and then confiscated his phone and all his belongings,” O’Brien tweeted.
“All this cannot silence @AITCofficial and the Opposition. BJP taking political vendetta to another level,” he said.
(With inputs from PTI)