New Delhi: A three-week-old tweet by former bureaucrat Ashish Joshi on an alleged “showdown” between Union home minister Amit Shah and the home secretary over the police crackdown on protesters at Jantar Mantar took centre stage during the Delhi Police’s interrogation of the retired officer on Wednesday. Even though he was ostensibly picked up from a city park and taken in for questioning on the basis of an FIR registered in relation to an August 26 tweet in which he had called for the Nuremberg-style trial of the Chief Election Commissioner, Joshi told The Wire that the police interrogation appeared focused on establishing his activities and contacts in the two days before his August 13 tweet about Amit Shah.That tweet about an apparent disagreement between the home minister and home secretary Govind Mohan has been withheld by X from India on the orders of the Modi government.Joshi says that the two plain-clothed policemen who accosted him at Nehru Park on Wednesday morning informed him that an FIR had been registered under Section 192 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita — “wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot” — for his tweet about the Chief Election Commission. They briefly showed him a folder containing the FIR but took it back. Joshi was told that he had tweeted against the home minister and that he would have to accompany the officers to the police station for questioning.At the police station he was made to wait for over an hour and told he was not allowed to even phone his wife to tell her he was held up and would not be coming home for some time. When his wife eventually phoned, he was allowed to answer but chose not to tell her he was being detained by the police. At that point, the police took his phone, asked him to unlock it and then put it in ‘flight’ mode so that no further calls would be received.Joshi says he asked his interrogators for a copy of the FIR but he was never given it. Asked who the complainant was, they said the police had taken cognisance of his August 28 tweet on the CEC their own.“While they did ask me what exactly I meant by a “Nuremberg style trial” for CEC Gyanesh Kumar, the questionnaire they gave me as well as their follow up questions made it apparent that what they were really investigating was how I came to tweet about the massive showdown between Amit Shah and the home secretary,” Joshi said. “They kept asking who the source of the information was for that tweet, which I refused to disclose on ethical grounds,” he added.He was also asked about why he had spoken to various people on the phone — especially retired IAS officers and retired police officers — and what the content of those calls had been.Joshi said that the interrogation was conducted in a polite and respectful manner. When the questioning over, the police insisted they would drop him home. When he reminded them that he had come to police station with them in his own car, they said they would drop his car home.