New Delhi: Assam Congress spokesperson Reetam Singh, a vocal critic of chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, particularly on social media, has been arrested for the third time in the span of a month by the state police. Sarma is also the state home minister, under whose direct jurisdiction the police comes.Singh was first arrested by Lakhimpur district police on March 15 based on a complaint lodged by the wife of Manab Deka, a Bharatiya Janata Party MLA, believed to be close to the chief minister. Deka had lodged the complaint on a post the Congress spokesperson had uploaded on X, claiming that it had “defamed” her husband and her father. Singh was arrested under the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act as her father belonged to a community in the Scheduled Caste list. Police also charged him with defamation and under sections of the Information Technology Acts.Singh was released on bail on March 28 by the Gauhati high court, which set aside those charges against him. Following his bail, Congress MP and general secretary media in-charge Jairam Ramesh had said that the Gauhati high court had found Singh’s arrest “riddled with procedural errors, evidencing the haste and illegality of the regime’s efforts to throttle his voice. Reetam was targeted by the State of Assam for his social media posts but now stands released from custody.”“This regime must learn that no matter what they throw at our workers and leaders, we will keep fighting for the common man,” Ramesh had said. However, on April 12, a team of Morigaon police took Singh into custody under the same Act, based on another complaint filed by a local BJP leader named Dhonti Sharma. According to the PTI, police had initially “refused to divulge the details of the latest case”, stating that “the matter was under investigation”. On being produced at the local court on April 13, Singh, who is also an advocate, told local media, “A political conspiracy has been hatched against me. A case has been filed just because I spoke about Ambedkar.”As he was granted bail in that case by a local court in Morigaon, another team of policemen, this time from the state’s Jagiroad police station, took the young opposition spokesperson into custody. In a video clip that has gone viral in the state, Singh’s father can be seen trying desperately to talk to his son inside the Jagiroad police’s van to know why he had been re-arrested, and police refusing to allow it. The distraught father is then seen lying in front of the vehicle to stop it. The video clip shows him being removed by the police and advised to visit the Jagiroad police station, located about 27 km from Morigaon jail to know the details. Reacting to Singh’s re-arrest, state Congress chief Bhupen Kumar Borah condemned it and accused chief minister Sarma of “curbing the people’s freedom of speech”. “Treating Reetam like a hardened criminal by dragging him from one police station to another and denying his parents a chance to meet him is a clear violation of human rights,” Borah said.“Reetam has been subjected to repeated arrests, treated as if he were a dangerous criminal, when his only ‘crime’ was exposing BJP leaders through his social media posts,” said the state Congress leader. Assam police was recently in news for arresting a local journalist while he was reporting on a protest at a co-operative bank for alleged corruption. Sarma is the bank’s director. The journalist, Dilwar Hussain Mozumder, was also arrested under the SC/ST Act by the state police but was granted bail by a local court in Guwahati. Days after he was granted bail, Mozumder’s brother was arrested on charges of land-grabbing.