Saket Gokhale sent to 2-day police custody : Why TMC spokesperson was arrested

A magistrate court in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad remanded Trinamool Congress (TMC) spokesperson Saket Gokhale to police custody till December 8 on Tuesday, hours after he was arrested over a complaint filed against him for allegedly tweeting a fake news about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Morbi after the suspension bridge collapse.

The prosecution contended that Gokhale’s custody was required to investigate the purpose of tweeting a fake and false tweet, reported Bar and Bench.

They also pointed out that there were two photos embedded in Gokhale’s tweet which referred to a newspaper cutting which was uploaded by another Twitter handle by the name of “Dax Patel”. The police wanted to check whether Gokhale was in touch with ‘Dax Patel’, it added.

Tweet against PM Modi

The police said as per the complaint filed, Gokhale had allegedly shared in what looked like a news clipping about an RTI query and its response where he claimed that ₹30 crore was spent on Modi’s Morbi visit, after a bridge collapse incident there.

The Press Information Bureau (PIB) in its fact-check on December 1 said, “This claim is fake. No such RTI response has been given.”

In Morbi town, a colonial-era suspension bridge collapsed on October 30, killing as many as 135 people, about four days after it was reopened upon renovation.

This the irony: Gokhale

Gokhale said the Oreva company owner, which was given the contract to maintain the suspension bridge in Morbi, has not been arrested while he has been. “This the irony,” he said, while being taken into a police van.

Gokhale had taken a Monday night flight from New Delhi to Jaipur in Rajasthan, from where he was “picked up” by Gujarat Police, tweeted Derek O’Brien, a senior leader of West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee led TMC.

“At 2 in the morning on Tuesday, he called his Ma and told her that they are taking him to Ahmedabad and he would reach Ahmedabad by noon today. The police let him make that one two-minute phone call and then confiscated his phone and all his belongings,” O’Brien further said in the tweet.

O’Brien alleged the case against the RTI activist-turned-politician has been “cooked up by the Ahmedabad cyber cell about Saket’s tweet on the Morbi bridge collapse”.

NDTV, citing officers in the Gujarat’s Cyber Cell unit, reported that Gokhale was detained by the Gujarat police from Jaipur without the knowledge of their Rajasthan counterparts.

Sources in Rajasthan Police told the news channel that they were not informed about the arrest.