The National Commission for Scheduled Castes on Tuesday issued notices to the Assam and Gujarat governments on a plea alleging violation of MLA Jignesh Mevani’s human rights by the police in the two states, The Indian Express reported.
Mevani, an Independent MLA in the Gujarat Assembly, was detained in the state’s Palanpur town by the Assam Police on April 20 for tweets about Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mevani had tweeted that the prime minister worshiped Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse.
He was held on the basis of a complaint filed by a leader of the Assam unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
After he was detained, Mevani was taken to Ahmedabad and was then flown to Assam. On Monday, he got bail, but was re-arrested in a separate case of alleged assault of a police official. On Tuesday, an Assam court denied him bail in the assault case.
Kirit Rathod, the convenor of Dalit rights group, Dalit Adhikar Manch, had filed a petition against Mevani’s arrest with the National Commission for Scheduled Castes. On Tuesday, the Scheduled Castes body asked chief secretaries of the Gujarat and Assam governments to file a response to the petition within a month.
In his petition, Rathod has sought legal action against the police, noting that the manner in which Mevani was arrested, has caused a lot of outrage among the people. Mevani being a sitting MLA, the police should have informed the speaker of the Gujarat Assembly before arresting him, Rathod told The Indian Express.
In the first complaint, it said that Mevani wrote on Twitter that “Modi worships and considers [Nathuram] Godse as God”. Godse had assassinated Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1948.
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