South Africa tour of India 2019
Mamata meme won’t hold up in court
BJP worker Priyanka Sharma who is a Howrah district’s convener of the Bhartiya Janta Yuva Morcha (BJYM), was arrested and sent to a 14 days judicial custody.
She was arrested over sharing a distort image of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Facebook. The image was basically Banerjee’s face put on Priyanka Chopra’s picture from the MET Gala event in New York. It has been now deleted from Facebook.
She was arrested on May 10 and has been charged under sections 500 of IPC, 66A and 67A of Information and Technology (IT) Act.
Her lawyer, Neeraj Kishan Kaul, filed a petition in the Supreme Court, said that the charges wouldn’t hold up in court, because for section 500 of the IPC, which is defamation, Mamata Banerjee, being the complainant, herself has to file the case, as to the section 66A which is for offensive content and 67A for sexually explicit material won’t stay valid because the content is not sexually offensive.
However, BJP did not quite down on Sharma’s arrest and reported it to be a violation of the freedom of speech.
