TEAM HERALD
PANJIM: Chief Minister Manohar Manohar Parrikar, speaking on the Devu Chodankar Facebook post controversy said that that Goa police had no intention to arrest the 33-year-old marine engineer, giving his side of the story.
The police had field an FIR against Chodankar after a complaint was filed against him by local businessman Atul Pai Kane for his comments against Narendra Modi on Facebook before he took over as prime minister.
“There was no intention to arrest the youth (Devu Chodankar),” he said adding that the State government had no role to play in all this as the police was just following Supreme Court orders.
“The FIR was filed in the case against him after a complaint…. In cases of all complaints, FIRs have to be registered, except in some five or six cases,” he said adding that the government had sent a circular on this to all police stations.
He however sought to allay fears that FIRs would mean anything saying that “FIR means nothing. Just because FIRs are filed, arrest is not imminent,” Parrikar said.
When he was asked whether the State had complained in this case the chief minister said that he had no attached much importance to this even as he sought o reiterate that no individual freedoms had been violated and there were a lot of cases filed like this in this regard.
“Why is the Congress making so much noise? In Karnataka which has a Congress government some 5 students were arrested for using words much less provocative than these,” he said, adding that even before that, the Congress government in Maharashtra had arrested a girl for some innocuous statement in Mumbai.
Police had filed an FIR under sections 153(A) (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language), 295-A (deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), besides section 125 of the Representation of People Act and section 66-A of the Information Technology Act.
