Story Highlights:
- TMC spokesperson Saket Gokhale arrested
- He defamed PM Modi in the Morbi accident case
- 135 people died in the bridge collapse incident
Jaipur: Saket Gokhale, the national spokesperson of the Trinamool Congress party and close aide to Mamata Banerjee, was arrested by the Gujarat Police from Jaipur Airport in Rajasthan late on Monday night. Gokhale is accused of spreading false news about Prime Minister Modi on the Morbi incident.
The arrest was informed by his party colleague and Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien. Derek tweeted that TMC’s national spokesperson Saket Gokhale has been arrested by the Gujarat Police from Jaipur Airport. On Monday, Saket took a flight from New Delhi to Jaipur at 9 pm. When he landed, the Gujarat Police were waiting for him at the Jaipur airport and arrested him.
According to Derek O’Brien, after his arrest, Gokhale called his mother at 2 a.m. on Tuesday and told her that the Gujarat Police was taking him to Ahmedabad and that he would reach Ahmedabad by noon today. The police allowed him to make a phone call of only two minutes and then confiscated his phone and all his belongings.
On December 1, 2022, TMC spokesperson Saket Gokhale claimed that PM Modi’s visit to Morbi in Gujarat after the bridge collapsed cost Rs 30 crore for only a few hours. Quoting a so-called report, Gokhale had claimed that Rs 5.5 crore was purely for reception, event management, and photography. He also claimed that Modi’s event management and PR cost was more than the lives of 135 people. Because the families of the 135 victims of the tragedy were given only Rs 4 lakh each as ex-gratia.
However, the Gujarat BJP termed the information given in Gokhale’s tweet as fake news. Gujarat BJP said that no such RTI was filed nor any such reply was given to any RTI. BJP Gujarat posted on Twitter that the new clipping is fabricated, and in fact, no such report was published anywhere. Notably, 135 people died due to a bridge collapse in Morbi in October, including 55 children. In this accident, 100 people were residents of the Morbi district alone.