Maharashtra Education Minister Vinod Tawde on Sunday denied allegations that he had forced the police to arrest an undergraduate student who was recording a conversation between the minister and another student, PTI reported. “It is some sort of a lie that is being spread against me,” he said. “I did not order the arrest of any student in Amravati.”

The alleged incident took place on January 4 after Tawde inaugurated an event at a college in Amravati. A student identified as Prashant Rathod was speaking to Tawde about the state government’s education policy as another student, Yuvraj Dabad, was video-recording the conversation.

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Rathod alleged that Tawde “first asked him [Dabad] to stop the recording and later ordered the police to arrest him”. Dabad said he had refused to stop recording as “he [Tawde] was not answering our queries”.

“We were simply asking questions and seeking his views,” Dabad said, claiming that Tawde then ordered the police to arrest him. “I was taken out of the college premises and detained for some time in the police vehicle,” Dabad added. “My handset was returned later in the evening. All the videos and recordings in my phone were deleted by the police without my permission.”

However, Amravati Police Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Baviskar said that Dabad was neither detained nor arrested, and that nothing was deleted from his phone. “In the midst of chaos in the college, the student concerned was taken outside the college, that’s it,” he said.

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Tawde claimed that the students who spoke to him were trying to spread lies about him. “Some of those students also came with pamphlets with ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ written on those and distributed them among the other students,” he claimed. “They were the ones who alleged that I ordered the arrest. It is completely false.”

Dabad said that on Saturday he submitted a letter to the Amravati police commissionerate and the district collectorate against Tawde and the concerned police officials for allegedly detaining him without permission of his college authorities and for deleting data from his phone.