He has been sent to six days of custody. Kejriwal is the fourth leader of the Aam Aadmi Party (AA) to be jailed during the last two years.
Satyendra Jain, the former cabinet minister in Kejriwal government was arrested on May 30, 2022, on the charge of laundering money through four companies allegedly linked to him. On February 26, 2023, Delhi’s former Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia was arrested by the CBI, and by the ED a month later, in the Excise Policy case. Sisodia is the key aide of Kejriwal and at the time of his arrest, he was handling 18 out of 33 portfolios in the Delhi government. The ED arrested AAP MP Sanjay Singh after conducting raids on October 4 last year at his residence in connection with a money laundering case linked to the Delhi excise policy.
According to the ED, which operates under the Department of Revenue, Government of India, a so-called ‘South Group’, the liquor cartel, comprising Telangana MLC K Kavitha, Sarath Reddy (promoter of Aurobindo Group), Magunta Srinivasulu Reddy (YSRCP MP, Ongole), his son Raghav Magunta, and others, were the beneficiaries of the excise policy in question. However, the data on electoral bonds released by the Election Commission showed that Reddy’s Aurobindo Pharma Limited had donated Rs 5 crore to the BJP in 2022, just five days after he was taken in custody. The company donated another Rs 25 crore to the BJP after he turned approver in the excise policy case. In all, the company bought electoral bonds worth Rs 52 crore, of which Rs 34.5 crore went to the BJP.
According to a report by the Indian Express, the ED has filed 95% of the cases against the Opposition leaders since 2014. The analysis mentioned that there has been a four-fold jump in ED cases against politicians since the BJP regime took over, in comparison to the Congress-led UPA regime. The report showed that between 2014 and 2022, out of 121 political leaders who were raided by the ED, 115 were Opposition leaders. However, during the UPA’s regime, a total of 26 politicians were probed by the ED. Of these, 14 were Opposition leaders.
Kejriwal became a household name after the massive nationwide anti-graft movement ‘India Against Corrution’ in 2011. In the years since Kejriwal became the mascot of the anti-corruption movement in the country, until he and AAP began to emerge as a thorn in the expansion plans of the BJP. The clean sweep of AAP in Delhi Assembly elections meant that despite all the efforts of the BJP to project the Prime Minister as the saviour of the country, the people of Delhi preferred Kejriwal to lead the Union Territory.
Recently, the Congress party’s bank accounts have been frozen and thus the party is unable to launch its campaign. The party has said that in the aftermath of the electoral bonds being scrapped and the details of the alleged quid pro quo, none of the major media houses in the country are willing to expose the present ruling dispensation.
While the country is in election mode for the eighteenth Lok Sabha, the current trends of using Central agencies to suppress the Opposition are signs of a dangerous precedent for a democracy. Where is the country’s democracy heading? Is it going to be a parliamentary authoritarian regime in the future?
