Trinamool Congress general secretary Abhishek Banerjee has attacked BJP over Saket Gokhale's arrest
Trinamool Congress (TMC) national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee today described the arrest of party spokesperson Saket Gokhale by Gujarat Police as a reaction of a "panic-stricken" BJP.
TMC will not bow down to such "acts of intimidation", he said.
"Fearless, Gokhale stood against the ruling dispensation that trades lives for its own profit. In reaction, panic-stricken @BJP4India got our national spokesperson @SaketGokhale arrested by Gujarat police. It is their (BJP's) folly to think these acts of intimidation will make us (TMC) to bow down!," Mr Banerjee tweeted.
Mr Gokhale recently tweeted a news clipping that apparently appeared to have been published in a leading Gujarati daily. It claimed that a query under the Right to Information revealed that the Gujarat government had spent Rs 30 crore on the Prime Minister's visit to Morbi after the bridge collapsed there.
Gujarat Police had initially detained Mr Gokhale and later arrested him over a tweet endorsing an alleged fake news report about Prime Minister Narendra Mod's visit to Morbi after a bridge collapsed there on October 31, killing 135 people.
Police detained the TMC spokesperson from Jaipur in Rajasthan during the early hours today.
TMC Rajya Sabha MP Derek O'Brien, while sharing the sequence of events leading to Mr Gokhale's detention and arrest, described the case filed with Ahmedabad Cyber Cell as "cooked up".
"Saket took a 9 pm flight from New Delhi to Jaipur on Monday. When he landed, Gujarat Police was at the airport, waiting for him and picked him up. At 2 am Today, 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.
Gujarat Police let him make that two-minute call and then confiscated his phone and all his belongings, Mr O'Brien tweeted.
"All this cannot silence @AITCofficial and the Opposition. BJP taking political vendetta to another level," he said.
TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh termed Mr Gokhale's "arrest" as "utterly disgraceful" and said the act showed that the BJP was trying to build an "autocratic nation".
He also claimed that the BJP's days at the Centre are numbered.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)