Mamata hits out at BJP govt’s ‘vindictive attitude’

“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 before heading for Pushkar.

The Gujarat Police have detained Gokhale over a tweet endorsing an alleged fake news report about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Morbi after a bridge collapse incident there on October 31, which had claimed 135 lives. It apprehended the TMC spokesperson from Jaipur in Rajasthan during the early hours of Tuesday.
Taking to Twitter, TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee said the TMC would not bow down to such “acts of intimidation”.

“Fearless, he stood against the ruling dispensation that trades lives for their own profit. In reaction, panic-stricken @BJP4India got our Nat’l Spokesperson @SaketGokhale arrested by Gujarat Police.

It’s their folly to think these acts of intimidation will make us bow down!” Banerjee wrote.

The official Twitter handle of the TMC said that they would not back down from such a move by the BJP. “When the powerful descend to tyranny, it becomes a moral duty to fight back! @BJP4India Government has unleashed the Gujarat Police on our Nat’l Spokesperson @SaketGokhale for questioning the ineptitude in the Morbi incident. We will not be silenced, we will not back down!” it wrote.

TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh termed Gokhale’s arrest as “utterly disgraceful” and said the act showed that the BJP was trying to build an “autocratic nation”. Ghosh also claimed that the BJP’s days at the Centre are numbered.

TMC Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien gave the sequence of events leading to Gokhale’s detention and described the case filed with the Ahmedabad Cyber Cell as “cooked up.”

“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 picking him up. At 2 am on Tuesday, he called up his mother and told her that they (Gujarat police) were 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.

Gokhale recently tweeted a news clipping which apparently appeared to have been published in a leading Gujarati newspaper. It claimed that a query under the right to information revealed that the Gujarat government had spent Rs 30 crore on Modi’s visit to Morbi after a bridge collapsed there in October.
—WITH PTI INPUTS