Trinamool Congress (TMC) spokesperson Saket Gokhale who was arrested twice in a span of four days was provided bail on Saturday. He was arrested for a tweet endorsing an alleged fake news report about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Gujarat’s Morbi town after the collapse of a suspension bridge on October 30.
On December 1, Gokhale tweeted, “RTI reveals that Modi’s visit to Morbi for a few hours cost ₹ 30 cr. Of this, ₹ 5.5 cr was purely for “welcome, event management, & photography.”
Soon after, Gokhale was detained at Jaipur in Rajasthan in the early hours of November 6 by officials of the Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Cell and brought in the afternoon to Ahmedabad where he was formally placed under arrest. Later, the TMC member was produced before the court of Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate M V Chauhan, who sent him to police custody till December 8.
Gokhale immediately got bail from a metropolitan court in Ahmedabad but was re-arrested by the Gujarat police.
Now out on bail again, Gokhale took to Twitter stating such incidents will only make him more robust against the Shah-Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
He said, “A frivolous case was filed for sharing a tweet made by someone else. Funnily the police have no clue who that person is. The aim was to find a way to target me, throw me into jail, and keep me there. This is the Modi & Shah textbook perfected in UP & Gujarat.”
Gokhale pointed out that while he was arrested twice in a span of three days, it has been months after the ill-fated Morbi bridge collapse which took over 140 lives, including 47 children, that the owners of Oreva company assigned to do maintenance work by the state government have not yet been named or arrested.
He also took a dig at the election commission naming it as an ‘ally of the BJP’. He said the EC was completely ok with communal speeches and roadshows by Prime Minister Modi on the day when the election took place.
Gokhale also thanked his party for supporting and standing by him. He also thanked his advocate Majeed Memom and Rajya Sabha TMC MP Jawar Sircar for raising his arrest issue in the Parliament.
