Aam Aadmi Party leaders and supporters protest against the arrest of former Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia in New Delhi on March 4.
| Photo Credit: ANI
Nine Opposition leaders on March 5 wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, expressing concern over the “blatant misuse of Central agencies against the members of the Opposition”, following the arrest of former Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia in the excise policy case.
The arrest was a “witch hunt” which suggests that “we have transitioned from being a democracy to an autocracy”, the letter stated.
The signatories of the letter include Chief Ministers K. Chandrashekar Rao, Mamata Banerjee, Bhagwant Mann and Arvind Kejriwal, along with National Conference’s Farooq Abdullah, Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar, Sena’s Uddav Thackeray, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav.
Congress did not sign the letter. Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi are under investigation by the Enforcement Directorate in a money laundering case related to the National Herald newspaper .
The letter, addressed to the Prime Minister, said, “… After a long witch-hunt, Manish Sisodia was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in connection with alleged irregularity without a shred of evidence against him,” adding that the charges were “outrightly baseless and smack of a political conspiracy”.
The CBI on February 26 evening arrested Mr. Sisodia in connection with alleged corruption in the formulation and implementation of the now-scrapped liquor policy for 2021-22. Mr. Sisodia was sent to judicial remand until March 4, which was later extended for two days after the CBI claimed that Mr. Sisodia was “not cooperating”.
The Opposition leaders wrote that Mr. Sisodia’s arrest only reaffirms what the world was only suspecting — that India’s democratic values had weakened and waned under an authoritarian BJP regime, they alleged.
The leaders called attention to the disproportionate number of arrests by Central agencies of Opposition leaders. “Since 2014, there has been a marked rise in the number of raids conducted, cases lodged against and arrest of the opposition leaders. Be it Lalu Prasad Yadav (Rashtriya Janata Dal), Sanjay Raut (Shiv Sena), Azam Khan (Samajwadi Party), Nawab Malik, Anil Deshmukh (NCP), Abhishek Banerjee (TMC), Central agencies have often sparked suspicion that they were working as extended wings of the ruling dispensation at the Centre. In many such cases, the timings of the cases lodged or arrests made have coincided with elections making it abundantly clear that they were politically motivated,” the Opposition leaders said in the letter.
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“Out of the total number of key politicians booked, arrested, raided or interrogated by the investigation agencies under your administration since 2014, the maximum belongs to the Opposition. Interestingly, investigation agencies go slow on cases against Opposition politicians who join the BJP,” the leaders wrote.
They took the example of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who was under scrutiny by the CBI and the ED in 2014 and 2015 over the Saradha chit fund scam. “However, the case didn’t progress after he (Mr. Sarma) joined the BJP. Similarly, former TMC (Trinamool Congress) leaders Suvendu Adhikari and Mukul Roy were under the ED and CBI scanner in the Narada sting operation case, but the cases didn’t progress after they joined the BJP ahead of the Assembly Election in the State (West Bengal),” the letter alleged.
During the BJP-led NDA’s eight years of governance, 118 of at least 124 prominent leaders who faced an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation belonged to Opposition parties, according to an Indian Express report.
The Opposition leaders question the timing and motivations behind the arrests, adding the Central agencies have “their priorities misplaced”, in a veiled reference to the inaction around the Hindenburg report that alleged stock manipulation and accounting fraud by the Adani Group. “Why have the Central agencies not been pressed into service to investigate the firm’s financial irregularities despite the public money at stake?”
