A day after getting cartoonist Aseem Trivedi’s custody for seven days, the Mumbai police made a sudden U-turn on Monday and told a court its investigation was over.
The Maharashtra government, facing public outrage over the police booking Trivedi for sedition, was in damage control mode. Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan met home minister R.R. Patil, who then instructed the police to get the cartoonist released.
After the police told the Bandra court it didn’t need Trivedi’s custody, it sent the 25-year-old cartoonist to judicial custody till September 24 as he refused to seek bail, demanding that the sedition charges against him be dropped. He has now been lodged at the Arthur Road jail.
The police told the court that Trivedi’s posters drawn during the Anna Hazare protests at the Bandra-Kurla complex were thrown away at the venue itself last year, and would be hard to recover now.