Gujarat MLA and Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani has been granted bail by a court in Assam in a case of alleged assault on a police officer.
Mevani was re-arrested in the alleged assault case on 25 April just after he was granted bail by another court in Assam in a case over tweets criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Te 41-year-old MLA was accused of “assaulting and outraging” the modesty of a woman police officer in the new case against him.
Mevani, an arch critic of PM Modi, was first arrested on Thursday from Gujarat’s Palanpur by a team of Assam police after a local BJP leader from Assam’s Kokrajhar filed a complaint against him over tweets on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Mevani’s three day police custody had ended on Sunday, after which he was produced before the court late in the evening. The court then sent him to one-day judicial custody.
Mevani has called his first arrest “vendetta politics by the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office)”. “It is a conspiracy by the BJP and the RSS. They did this to tarnish my image. They have been doing this systematically. They did it to Rohit Vemula, they did it to Chandrasekhar Azad, now they are targeting me,” Mevani told reporters today.
The Congress and other Opposition parties staged protests in Assam in support of Mevani following his arrest.
