In Kejriwal’s arrest, Modi’s clear message: No quarter to rivals in poll season

Within hours of the Delhi High Court’s refusal to grant Arvind Kejriwal any protection against coercive action, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) swooped in at the Delhi chief minister’s official residence, on Thursday (March 21). After few dramatic hours of ED raids inside Kejriwal’s home and raucous protests by Aam Aadmi Party leaders outside it, Kejriwal was taken into ED’s custody late Thursday evening in connection with the alleged Delhi Excise Policy scam.

Whether the Delhi CM will now join a growing list of Opposition leaders, including his AAP colleagues Manish Sisodia, Sanjay Singh and Satyender Jain, to be incarcerated for an indefinite period of time, will be known once the Supreme Court hears the petition challenging his arrest. Immediately after the Delhi CM was taken into ED custody, AAP leaders moved the apex court seeking an urgent hearing on Thursday night itself, challenging his arrest. The court’s registry, however, refused to grant Kejriwal the late-night hearing and his petition is expected to be heard by the Supreme Court on Friday.

Modi’s message to rivals

Notwithstanding the fate of his petition and irrespective of whether the Delhi CM’s arrest is quashed on Friday or he spends a prolonged time in custody, police or judicial, the action against Kejriwal sends a larger political message from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP regime to his political rivals weeks before the seven-phase Lok Sabha poll commences on April 19.

Kejriwal’s arrest, as evident from its robust condemnation by a gamut of Opposition leaders, cannot be seen in isolation. In it, the Opposition’s INDIA bloc sees a continuation of the “politics of vendetta and intimidation” against its members by the Modi government. Only on Thursday morning, former Congress chiefs Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi and present Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge addressed a rare joint press conference where they read a requiem to Indian democracy following the pre-election freezing of all Congress-linked bank accounts and the “forcible” withdrawal of over Rs 115 crore from them by the Income Tax department. The day ended with the arrest of Kejriwal and an ominous prophecy by Rahul of a “scared dictator” (read: Narendra Modi) trying to “create a dead democracy”.

Days earlier, BRS leader and former Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s daughter, K Kavitha, too, was arrested by the ED for her alleged role in the same case in which Kejriwal has now been picked up. Last month, the same probe agency had arrested Hemant Soren in another alleged money-laundering case, shortly after he resigned as Jharkhand chief minister. For months, the ED and the CBI have been taking turns summoning and questioning RJD supremo Lalu Yadav’s family members while the Damocles’ sword of imminent arrest has also been hanging over Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew and Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee.

Endless probes by “ICE”

The list of Opposition leaders facing investigations by the IT department, the CBI or the ED — given the acronym of ICE by NCP leader Supriya Sule — has, over the past decade, become as endless as the period of incarceration of sundry rivals and critics, both political figures and public intellectuals alike, who have found themselves embroiled in one case or the other. That none of these cases have reached anywhere near even a preliminary stage of prosecution, beyond the arrest, tells a tale of its own.

With Lok Sabha polls days away and the INDIA bloc finally taking some shape despite several setbacks and its own contradictions, Opposition leaders The Federal spoke to predicted “the arrest of Hemant Soren and Kejriwal or the freezing of Congress’s accounts is only a trailer... the worst is yet to come”.

“I had predicted two months ago that as the elections draw closer, the two people at the top of the government (Modi and home minister Amit Shah) will unleash every kala kauwa (crows) in their cage, be it the ED, the CBI or the IT, and they will hound, harass and intimidate any Opposition leader who isn’t willing to strike a deal with them. They tried to do it with Lalu and Tejashwi, they have done it with Hemant and Arvind, they are trying every possible trick to cripple the Congress and this will go on, either till all INDIA leaders land up in jail or this government is voted out,” RJD MP Manoj Kumar Jha said.

“Major self-goal”

Echoing similar views, AAP leader and Kejriwal’s ministerial colleague Saurabh Bhardwaj told The Federal, “All this is obviously being done at Modi’s behest... for months Modi and Amit Shah have prepared ground to arrest Kejriwal just as they have done with all other Opposition leaders; this is what undeclared Emergency looks like... the BJP has burnt the Constitution, it has thrown all laws out of the window because its only concern is to somehow remain in power and it sees the INDIA parties as the biggest hurdle in that quest.”

AAP leader Jasmine Shah claimed, “Today’s arrest of Arvind Kejriwal marks the moment when the reverse countdown of the Modi raj begins. Game on!” While Jasmine’s prophecy may yet seem far-fetched given the continuing popularity of Modi and the formidable electoral machinery of the BJP as opposed to a doddering INDIA bloc, several Opposition leaders The Federal spoke to believed that by arresting Kejriwal, the BJP has scored a “major self-goal”.

Where AAP matches BJP

“Unlike the Congress, the AAP has proved itself time and again as a party that can give the BJP back in its own coin; like the BJP, the AAP also believes in a politics of street fighting and this was evident the moment the ED team reached Kejriwal’s home; AAP leaders quickly mobilised the party cadre to surround Kejriwal’s house and they were swift in reacting to the situation... had a similar thing happened with the Congress leadership, their members would have, at best, taken out a march to the ED office, like the one we saw when Sonia Gandhi and Rahul were called in for questioning, and then it would have been business as usual... AAP won’t do that; they will bring Delhi to a halt and create a law and order situation,” said a Left Front leader.

A JMM leader told The Federal that unlike his party or outfits such as the RJD, BRS, DMK or the NCP, the AAP has the “advantage of being anchored in Delhi”, which makes it easy for Kejriwal supporters to “draw attention of the national and international media on the excesses of the Modi government”.

“No matter how much control Modi exerts on the press, a protest in Delhi will always attract attention and because AAP’s original karmabhoomi is Delhi and the party has evolved from a movement, it knows how to mobilise support... protests in Ranchi, Patna or one that has been going on for weeks now in Ladakh do not get the kind of attention that a protest in Delhi draws... if the AAP manages to sustain its protests even with Kejriwal in custody, the BJP will have a tough time retaining the seven Lok Sabha seats of Delhi and it may even have a ripple effect benefitting the INDIA bloc in other states,” the JMM leader said.

Joint protest by INDIA

Sources told The Federal that the Congress, which ironically plunged into its current existential crisis in no small part due to the rise of Kejriwal’s AAP from Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement a decade ago, is now reaching out to all INDIA bloc leaders in a bid to launch a “joint protest” against “the BJP’s undemocratic and illegal assaults on the Opposition”. Congress president Kharge, said sources, had begun dialling up INDIA partners soon after Kejriwal’s arrest in an attempt to “formulate a joint INDIA statement condemning the Modi government” and also to discuss the possibility of convening a joint INDIA bloc protest rally.

The Congress believes Kejriwal’s arrest adds heft to Rahul’s assertion of “Indian democracy is now a lie” and the INDIA bloc needs to send an unequivocal message of its joint pushback against the BJP. If Kharge’s design works, it would also indirectly help the Congress put added pressure on the government and even the courts to “de-freeze” the party’s accounts ahead of the polls so that the Congress isn’t starved of funds to contest the Lok Sabha elections.

Can Kejriwal milk the issue?

A Congress leader also said it would be “more than how the BJP defends the ED action against Kejriwal, it would be interesting to see what spin Kejriwal gives to this whole episode and whether he is able to generate voter sympathy for himself and the AAP in the elections.”

The leader added, “Our differences with Kejriwal aside, there is one thing he shares in common with Modi and that is his remarkable capacity to brazen out any kind of controversy or criticism... he is almost as good as Modi in spin-doctoring a narrative that may sound bizarre to his rivals but somehow works with his voter base... this is going to get interesting; the BJP may just have made a huge blunder that it come to regret very soon; perhaps even sooner than expected if the Supreme Court continues to take the firm stance that it has shown in the Electoral Bonds case.”

Opposition leaders agree that with Kejriwal’s arrest, Modi has signalled that he will give no quarter to the INDIA bloc’s collective leadership in the forthcoming Lok Sabha battle. There are also obvious apprehensions over whose doors the ED, CBI or IT may land up at next; something that INDIA leaders concede could be used as a glue to close ranks in the alliance for posing a pitched challenge to the BJP.

For now, though, all eyes will be at the Supreme Court on Friday when Kejriwal’s petition challenging his arrest is taken up for hearing.