A political party’s spokesman has been arrested for sharing an apparently false claim about the expenditure involved in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Morbi in Gujarat, in November, in the aftermath of the collapse of a bridge that caused nearly 140 deaths. Even if the claim that a fabulous sum of money was spent on preparations and the renovation of facilities for the visit was false, the arrest of Saket Gokhale, spokesman of the All India Trinamool Congress, is in striking contrast to the fact that the promoters and executives of the company, whose negligence could have caused the recently renovated bridge to collapse, have not been detained so far. It is difficult not to highlight the irony involved, as the penal sections invoked against Mr. Gokhale for the offence of forgery attract prison terms of two to three years only; whereas the acts of commission and omission that led to such a high fatality figure are punishable with prison terms ranging from 10 years to life. Nothing but an intention to teach a lesson to an Opposition political activist can explain the arrest of Mr. Gokhale when he could, instead, have been summoned for an inquiry. It is one of those cases in which arrest is obviously avoidable, even if the government of the day is seriously aggrieved by the purported falsehood in the claim that he shared on Twitter.
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