Guwahati: Assam Police arrested Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani late last night, and flown to Assam this morning from Ahmedabad.
Reportedly, he was arrested after a BJP leader in Assam filed a complaint about now-deleted comments about Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Jignesh Mevani was arrested and taken to Ahmedabad from a Circuit House in Palanpur about 11.30 p.m. on Wednesday.
A complaint was lodged against him by Arup Kumar Dey, a BJP politician from Kokrajhar of Assam. The First Information Report, or FIR, is a list of offences that promote community animosity.
“According to a document supplied by Assam police officials, a FIR has been filed in connection with a tweet sent by Mevani a few days ago. However, Twitter has delayed the tweet. It was about Nathuram Godse. Mevani was first brought by road to Ahmedabad, and then by air to Assam early this morning,” as per Mr Mevani’s aide Suresh Jat.
Gujarat Congress president Jagdish Thakor and other Congress leaders rushed to Ahmedabad airport after learning of Mr Mevani’s arrest and shouted slogans against the BJP government.
Mr. Mevani is an independent MLA who supported the Congress last year as a Dalit politician and convenor of the political party Rashtriya Dalit Adhikar Manch. He is a former journalist, an MLA from Gujarat’s Vadgam, and a lawyer activist.
Authorities requested that posts from him on April 18 be withheld, according to his Twitter account.
Mr Mevani and Kanhaiya Kumar, a political activist and former student union leader at Jawaharlal Nehru University, held a press conference with Congress’s Rahul Gandhi in September last year, where Mr Kumar joined the party and Mr Mevani extended his support to Mr Gandhi until the end of his term as an independent MLA, after which he would join the Congress.