Trinamool Congress (TMC) spokesperson Saket Gokhale, who was arrested by Ahmedabad Police on Tuesday, has been granted bail. He was arrested in connection with a tweet he posted about the Morbi bridge collapse incident.
An Ahmedabad resident had filed a complaint against Gokhale over the tweet. A team of the cyber crime department detained Saket Gokhale when he arrived in Rajasthan’s Jaipur from New Delhi early on Tuesday morning
Party leader Derek O’brien had shared the details via tweets soon after Gokhale’s arrest. “TMC national spokesperson @SaketGokhale arrested by Gujarat Police. 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,” he tweeted.
“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,” he tweeted.
“The cooked up case is filed with the Ahmedabad cyber cell about Saket’s tweet on the Morbi bridge collapse. All this cannot silence @AITCofficial and the Opposition. BJP taking political vendetta to another level,” the TMC MP said.
On Thursday, Saket Gokhale moved an Ahmedabad magistrate court seeking bail. Arguing on his behalf, lawyer and former Rajya Sabha MP Majeed Memon said that Gokhale was ready to delete his tweet. He further argued that Gokhale had merely retweeted an existing tweet as a concerned citizen, asking for accountability of public money.
Saket Gokhale had tweeted a clipping of an alleged Right to Information (RTI) query reply and wrote that the PM’s visit had cost ₹30 crore. On December 1, the Press Information Bureau had denied the authenticity of the RTI response. “This claim is fake. No such RTI response has been given,” it said.
