It wasn’t just the Assam Police that summarily picked up Independent North Gujarat MLA and firebrand Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani in a midnight knock from a State Government circuit house without producing an FIR, the Gujarat Police was already on the prowl raiding his family home in Ahmedabad, his MLA quarter in Gandhinagar, homes of his supporters and his office of the Rashtriya Dalit Adhikar Manch, a Dalit rights organisation he had set up after the 2016 Una flogging case.
According to his supporter and advocate Subodh Parmar, the Ahmedabad Crime Branch officials searched four addresses that they had. At their Dalit organisation office in Rakhial in Ahmedabad, they took away a desktop computer and the CPU.
The Crime Branch officials also stormed the home of Kamlesh Kataria who is a close assistant of Jignesh and snatched away his mobile phone.
In the same way, the police broke open his MLA quarters took away two desktop computers, along with the CPU, and snatched away the mobile phones of two of his associates, Subodh Parmar informed.
More shocking, the police reached Mevani’s assistant Satish’s home in Palanpur and not finding him at home, took away his parent’s mobile phones.
Mevani was taken to Kokrajhar district in Assam and was produced before a local court later where his bail plea was rejected and police was granted three days of remand. His team said the Congress legal team representing him shall appeal before Assam high Court on April 25 (Monday).
Meanwhile, Mevani’s Twitter account showed that some of his recent tweets had been “withheld in India in response to a legal demand”.
Mevani won from Vadgam constituency in 2017 state election and became the only Independent MLA in the Gujarat Assembly.
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