Filmmaker Avinash Das detained for sharing Amit Shah's photo with jailed IAS officer

The Ahmedabad Crime Branch police on Tuesday afternoon picked up filmmaker Avinash Das from outside his Mumbai residence for recently sharing on social media a 2017 picture of Union Home Minister Amit Shah chatting with Jharkhand IAS officer Pooja Singhal, who was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a money laundering case.

Das, 46, who had made the feature film ‘Anaarkali of Aarah,’ had recently moved the Bombay High Court for transit pre-arrest bail plea in the same case, which was rejected by the court. Police sources said a team of Ahmedabad’s Detection of Crime Branch had been trying to locate the filmmaker in Mumbai for a week.

The Ahmedabad DCB police station, in an FIR on May 13, had also lodged a case against Das for allegedly insulting the national flag by sharing a morphed picture of a woman wearing a Tricolour on his Facebook account.

He has been booked under Section 469 (forgery) of the Indian Penal Code, Section 67 of the Information Technology Act and sections of the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act.

Officials said Das was detained while on way to office from his residence in Mumbai on Tuesday afternoon. He will be brought to Ahmedabad and produced before a court, police officials said.

The filmmaker had recently tweeted a picture of Shah and the now arrested IAS officer Singhal chatting with each other at a public event.

Going by the official complaint registered by the Ahmedabad Crime Branch, Das had allegedly shared the picture of the minister and the bureaucrat from a public event in Ranchi held five years ago in 2017 to “allegedly mislead the people and defame the reputation of Amit Shah.”