Alleging “political vendetta” by the BJP, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress has claimed that its national spokesperson Saket Gokhale has been arrested by Gujarat Police over a tweet about the Morbi bridge collapse.
Narrating the turn of events that culminated in the arrest of Gokhale, party leader Derek O’Brien said that Gokhale was at the Rajasthan airport when he was picked up by Gujarat Police. “At 2 in the morning on Tuesday, he called his mother 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.”
TMC national spokesperson @SaketGokhale arrested by Gujarat Police.
Saket took a 9pm flight from New Delhi to Jaipur on Mon. When he landed, Gujarat Police was at the airport in Rajasthan waiting for him and picked him up. 1/3
— Derek O'Brien | ডেরেক ও'ব্রায়েন (@derekobrienmp) December 6, 2022
The party did not specify which tweet, but the government’s fact-check unit had recently pinpointed Gokhale’s tweet in which he shared what looked like newspaper clippings saying “RTI revealed the PM’s visit to Morbi cost ₹ 30 crore”.
Gokhale had tweeted, “RTI reveals that Modi’s visit to Morbi for a few hours cost ₹30 cr. Of this, 5.5cr was purely for “welcome, event management, & photography”. 135 victims who died got 4 lac ex-gratia each i.e. 5cr. Just Modi’s event management & PR costs more than life of 135 people.””
On December 1, the Press Information Bureau shared a screenshot of Gokhale’s tweet and said, “This claim is fake” on its Twitter page.
In Gujarat’s Morbi town, a colonial-era hanging bridge collapsed on October 30, killing over 130 people, just four days after it was reopened upon renovation. The probe revealed the municipal authorities’s mismanagement as the contractor who had undertaken the renovation work had failed to acquire all necessary clearance before reopening the bridge for the general public.