Defamation case filed against Jignesh Mevani in Pune for tweeting morphed photo

A case of defamation has been registered against Gujarat MLA and Dalit activist Jignesh Mevani by freelance columnist Shefali Vaidya in Pune's Paud police station for allegedly tweeting her morphed picture.

On May 29, Mevani had tweeted the picture showing Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Vaidya together.

Along with that picture, there was another picture from the Paresh Rawal starrer movie 'Oh My God' and Mevani allegedly tried drawing a parallel between those two pictures.

"Seeing this (picture) I really want to say Oh My God! It has become too filmy. Did art predict real life? Like a film, these three are also big actors." Mevani had also called them 'Dramebaaz' in the same tweet.

The tweet had got over 900 retweets and over 3,000 likes, however, after finding out that the photo he had tweeted was morphed, Mevani deleted his tweet. Next day, that is on May 30, Mevani apologised by tweeting in which he stated, "I am told that this is a photoshopped image. Apologies for posting it without verification. Deleting my previous tweet now and will be careful in future. We all should be careful about this and whenever we get to know that it is fabricated, we should delete it.'

Though Mevani deleted his tweet, taking offense, Vaidya, approached the Paud police station and lodged the complaint against him.

Vaidya in her complaint stated that her photo was downloaded from her Facebook account and later it was cropped and morphed along with the photos of Adityanath and Ravi Shankar. Defamatory comments were made using that morphed photo.

Based on her complaint, Paud police registered the case against Gujarat MLA on June 3.

Senior police officer from Pune rural police said, "The police has registered a case of defamation under section 500 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and also under section 66 (C) of Information Technology Act 2000."