Shared Mamata's cartoon: Bengal professor gets acquitted after 11 yrs

Kolkata: After eleven years of legal battle, a university professor in West Bengal got clean chit on a case of forwarding a cartoon related to the state Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and then Trinamool Congress's national general secretary Mukul Roy, IANS reported.

The Jadavpur University's chemistry professor Ambikesh Mahapatra forwarded the cartoon to an email group of a housing society in the southern outskirts of Kolkata in April 2012. Someone in the group filed a complaint at the local police station.

Following that, Mahapatra and the-then secretary of the housing complex, Subrata Sengupta, were arrested under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Though both were granted bail, the case continued, and that was too even after the Supreme Court scrapped Section 66A of the IT Act and asked all state governments to close and drop all cases under this act in 2016.

Both the arrestees had approached the West Bengal Human Right Commission (WBHRC). It had recommended the state government pay compensation to both of them, but the government refused.

In 2019, Sengupta died at the age of 80, but the case against Mahapatra continued.

After release, receiving clean chit, Mahapatra said, "Despite the unconstitutional approach of the state government, state police and state's ruling party in the matter, I finally got acquitted from the case. This is a victory of the constitutional responsibility of a democratic citizen of the country towards the democratic system of the country,"