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Indian authorities have arrested Arvind Kejriwal, chief minister of Delhi and one of the country’s most prominent opposition leaders, a move critics of Narendra Modi said was part of a pre-election crackdown by the prime minister.
Kejriwal was arrested after a team from the Enforcement Directorate, which is responsible for investigating and prosecuting economic crimes, questioned him at his residence on Thursday evening as part of a money laundering case linked to excise policy in the capital region.
Kejriwal, 55, is head of the opposition Aam Admi party (AAP) and one of the most vocal critics of Modi, who is seeking a third five-year term in office in the general election which opens on April 19.
“Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest is a political conspiracy by the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” said Atishi Patel, a senior member of the AAP, which governs Delhi’s capital region and also India’s northern Punjab state.
Several AAP leaders have already been jailed over accusations of receiving kickbacks and offering special favours to companies awarded lucrative liquor licences. They deny the claims.
A BJP spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The ANI news agency quoted Manjinder Singh Sirsa, a senior member of the ruling party, as saying: “The utterly corrupt chief minister of Delhi is being punished for his bad deeds.”
Opposition parties, united in a fragile electoral alliance called the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, or INDIA, have accused the government of a heavy-handed crackdown on their activities in the run-up to the election.
The Indian National Congress, the country’s biggest opposition party, on Thursday said it was unable to continue campaigning because all its bank accounts had been frozen in connection with an ongoing tax dispute.
“Our leaders cannot travel from one part of the country to the other,” said Rahul Gandhi, a Congress MP and the party’s most prominent figure. “We’re unable to put out our ads.”
Gandhi said there was “no democracy in India today”, adding: “The people of India are being robbed of their constitution and democratic structure.”
Opinion polls show Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party, which has governed India since 2014, is the strong favourite to win the election. It has spoken of taking as many as 400 seats with its National Democratic Alliance partners in India’s 543-seat lower house, up from the 353 seats they won in 2019.
Asim Ali, a political commentator, said the arrest was a “big political move” and part of a plan by the BJP to discredit Kejriwal and disrupt co-operation between the AAP and Congress in order to help the ruling party in the capital region and in two other states.
“The BJP is taking a big political risk and I think the idea is to derail the alliance of the Congress and AAP in Delhi as well as Haryana and Goa,” he said.
Kejriwal became a household name in India for his role in a huge anti-corruption movement in 2011 and his upstart party beat the BJP’s formidable election machine in Delhi state polls in 2015 and 2020.
Patel of the AAP told journalists that Kejriwal’s team had approached the Supreme Court to ask it to quash his arrest.
“Arvind Kejriwal was, is and will remain the Delhi chief minister,” she said when asked whether he would resign from his post.
