Toolkit Case: Delhi Police Gives Cong Leaders Notice to Join Probe

Cong’s Rohan Gupta and MV Rajeev Gowda had filed complaints against BJP’s Sambit Patra for sharing a fake toolkit..

Delhi Police sends notice to Twitter over toolkit row

(Photo: The Quint)

The Delhi Police Special Cell has issued notices to Congress leaders in connection with the BJP’s “toolkit” allegations on 25 May. These include Congress social media head Rohan Gupta and the party spokesperson MV Rajeev Gowda, who had filed complaints against BJP’s Sambit Patra for sharing a ‘fake toolkit’ that he attributed to the Congress.

Gowda said, according to NDTV, “We have told the Delhi Police that our complaint is being investigated by Chhattisgarh and we will pursue the matter there.”

BJP’s Sambit Patra is also likely to be questioned in the coming days, The Indian Express reported.

These notices were sent a day after Delhi Police officials visited Twitter’s office in Delhi and Gurgaon to serve notices in the same case. Twitter had flagged some posts by BJP leaders, including Patra’s on the toolkit – alleging a Congress plot to malign PM Modi – as “manipulated media”.

This was after Patra, on 18 May, had shared a tweet with screenshots of what he called a ‘Congress toolkit’ aimed at discrediting Prime Minister Modi and the government’s handling of the pandemic.

Congress responded by filing FIRs in Congress-ruled Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan against Patra and three other BJP leaders. They also complained to Twitter that the toolkit being shared was fake.

The Quint’s WebQoof team did a detailed story to show that the errors and discrepancies in the toolkit hint towards the fact that it may not be authentic. Read the story here.

After Twitter tagged Patra’s tweet as ‘manipulated media’, the central government’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology wrote objecting to it.

A senior police officer said they are conducting a preliminary inquiry before registering an FIR in the case.

“We served notice to Twitter as we want to know what information Twitter has about the toolkit and why they chose to give the ‘manipulated media’ label. Apart from Twitter, we have also served notices to the complainants, representatives of Congress, asking them to join the investigation to explain the whole sequence of events. We are also going to serve notice to BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra, for questioning in the coming days,” a police official told The Indian Express.

Delhi Police PRO Chinmoy Biswal told the newspaper this was “a part of a routine process”.

“This was necessitated as we wanted to ascertain who is the right person to serve a notice, as replies by Twitter India MD have been very ambiguous,” he said.

(With inputs from The Indian Express)