‘Cooked-up case’ — TMC slams spokesperson Saket Gokhale’s arrest by Gujarat cops for ‘Modi tweet’

Dec 06, 2022

NEW DELHI: Trinamool Congress national spokesperson Saket Gokhale was arrested by Gujarat Police late Monday night, the party has said in a statement.

"Saket took a 9 pm flight from New Delhi to Jaipur on Monday. When he landed, Gujarat Police were at the airport in Rajasthan waiting for him and picked him up," Trinamool's Derek O'Brien, the Trinamool's parliamentary leader in Rajya Sabha, said Tuesday.

He added: "At 2 am in the morning on Tuesday, he called his Ma (mother) and told her that they are taking him to Ahmedabad and he would reach Ahmedabad by noon today (Tuesday). The police let him make that one two-minute phone call and then confiscated his phone and all his belongings."

According to sources in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party in power in Gujarat, the cyber cell of Gujarat police filed a case against the RTI activist turned politician last week, for tweeting about expenses allegedly incurred for PM Modi's trip to Morbi in Gujarat, where the collapse of a suspension bridge in October killed at least 141 people, including minors.

Last week Gokhale, purportedly quoting from a Right to Information (RTI) response, had claimed "Modi's visit to Morbi for a few hours cost Rs 30 crore." The Trimalool Congress leader had added that around Rs 5.5 crore was spent just on welcoming the PM to Morbi, event management and photography. In comparison, he wrote, the victims had got only Rs 4 lakhs each as compensation.

Gujarat's state BJP unit had, however, immediately issued a statement refuting the charges calling it "fake" news and claiming that no such RTI was ever filed.