TNN
Ahmedabad, Oct 29: Gandhinagar district police on Monday arrested general secretary of Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s (VHP) Ahmedabad city unit, Ashwin Patel, on charges of sedition, defamation and inflaming communal passions.
The development shocked saffron organisations who tried interpreting his disappearance as a case of abduction. Smarting from allegations of links with Malegaon blast accused Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, the BJP seemed to be putting pressure on the VHP.
International general secretary of VHP Pravin Togadia said that Patel received a call on his cell phone around 7 pm on Monday and was told to collect some CDs and literary books from a school located near VHP headquarters in Paldi. "Since then, he has been missing and could not be contacted," Togadia said.
Police sources told TOI that early on Tuesday at around 3 am, Gandhinagar district police picked up Ashwin Patel from Ranip and VHP’s north Gujarat in-charge, Devji Rawat, from Sabarmati. They were charged with sending SMSes against Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his government soon after Ahmedabad serial blasts on July 26. Rawat was released on Tuesday morning, but Patel was arrested by sector 28 police station in Gandhinagar.
An offence was registered by local crime branch police inspector PP Bhatt. The FIR said, "For the past two to two-and-a-half months, derogatory and defamatory SMSes were doing the rounds about Narendra Modi and his government. Besides there were SMSes to mislead about the Malegaon, Modasa and Ahmedabad blasts and the language used could have incited communal passions". Police tracked the number from which SMSes were coming to Patel and realised that the address was fake.
Treasurer of VHP, Amrish Patel said, "Police arrested these workers late in the night without summons. They were receiving a lot of phone calls from people wanting to give information about the blasts so we believe the callers were from the police force."
Togadia said that VHP would file a complaint of abduction. Although the government is the complainant in this matter, when TOI contacted minister of state for home Amit Shah, he said he didn’t know anything about the incident. Patel is also a businessman based in Ahmedabad.