Indian opposition leader arrested for insulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi with pun

An Indian opposition leader was arrested at New Delhi airport on Thursday after being accused of insulting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi over a pun between the surnames of dignitary and billionaire Gautam Adani.

Pawan Kheraa prominent figure in the opposition Congress (INC) party, was released on bail hours later by order of the Supreme Court of India, but the party called the incident a violation of freedom of expression.

“Today our top leaders were traveling from Delhi to Raipur on an Indigo flight. They had boarded the plane when our leader Pawan Khera was asked to disembark and was subsequently arrested,” the INC said on Twitter.

Khera called India’s PM ‘Narendra Gautamdas Modi’ during a press conference last Monday, changing the president’s middle name “Damodardas” to the first name of the Adani multimillionairewhose group collapsed on the stock market under 100,000 million dollars after being accused of stock market manipulation and stock market fraud.

Khera’s statement would also allude to alleged favorable treatment of the Adani Group by the government and, furthermore, would have been a comment to demand a parliamentary commission investigation against businessman Gautam Adani.

The leader of the Congress Party, a party which has called for an investigation into the accusations against the Adani group in the face of veiled support from the Indian government, later said that it was a slip

Inadvertent slip or pun Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) saw in the sentence a serious attack on the dignity of the prime minister and the powerful interior minister, Amit Shah, took the opportunity last Monday to condemn what happened.

“For a prime minister who is so dear to us, the kind of language that has been used is something that I strongly condemn,” Shah said at a political rally in Nagaland state, northeastern country, according to statements reported by the newspaper. Indian Express.

But the dialectical clash led to a complaint from a BJP member in Assam state, and authorities dispatched a police team to arrest Khera.

“Free speech is slowly weakening in Indiabut freedom of speech AFTER is fast dying out,” Jairam Ramesh, the Congress Party’s general secretary for communications, said on Twitter.

Last year, a Congress Party MP from the Indian state of Gujarat, Jignesh Mevani, a member of the Dalit (untouchable) caste, was arrested after saying on Twitter that the prime minister worships Hindu fundamentalist Nathuram Godse “like a god”. “mahatma” Gandhi, considered the father of India.

(With information from EFE and EuropaPress)

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