Clean chit in liquor case puts Team Kejriwal back in the game

Buoyed by his discharge in the liquor policy case, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal has come out all guns blazing. After Delhi court let him and his closest aide, former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia off in the case, Kejriwal accused the BJP of vendetta politics, dared Prime Minister Narendra Modi to hold fresh elections in Delhi and hit out at the Congress party’s top leadership too.

Rounded off perfectly with him "breaking down" before the camera crews, Kejriwal’s dramatic appearance on Friday (February 27) was a reminder of the AAP chief’s quintessential politics. It projected, in equal measure, Kejriwal’s self-righteousness, a looming disruption within the Opposition space and an unhinged tirade against the ruling BJP that is likely to escalate.

Kejriwal’s comeback

This was vintage Kejriwal; the self-anointed anti-corruption crusader who cast a spell on Delhi and ruled it for nearly a decade between 2015 and 2025 on the back of successive brute majorities, before the liquor scam case took the sheen off him and handed both him and his party a humiliating defeat in last February’s polls.

Now armed with a clean chit from the court, which also gave him the bonus of a trove of damning indictments for the CBI that was probing the case, Kejriwal made his year-long absence from Delhi following the poll loss seem like an aberration.

Also read: Kejriwal's acquittal in liquor scam: A verdict that indicts more than CBI

Sources in the AAP told The Federal that the party’s spokespersons have already been directed to tell the media and the public at large that Kejriwal’s disappearance from Delhi following the party’s assembly poll defeat was nothing but a “self-imposed exile”; one that is ending now because the AAP chief has “passed the agni-pariksha (trial by fire)”.

AAP spokesperson and former Delhi minister Saurabh Bharadwaj said the party will organise a massive show of strength at Jantar Mantar on March 1, where Kejriwal, and his co-accused in the CBI’s liquor scam case who now all stand exonerated, will “seek blessings of the people of Delhi” and lay out the roadmap of the party’s activities moving forward.

The epicentre of protests in the national capital, Jantar Mantar is of immense symbolic significance to the AAP. It was here that the party was born back in November 2012; emerging from the embers of Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption movement. Through AAP’s years in power in Delhi, Kejriwal may have forgotten all the promises he made at Jantar Mantar 13 years ago – instituting a strong Lokpal in Delhi, disclosing the party’s source of funds, denying tickets to tainted leaders, regular elections for the AAP chief’s post, et al – but the site remains central to the party’s public image.

Expansion plans

With the CBI’s case against him and his colleagues falling apart even before it could go to trial, AAP sources said Kejriwal has “reclaimed the moral high ground that set him apart from all career politicians”. It is this message – kattar imaandaar (incorruptible) Kejriwal – that the AAP chief is expected to hammer down when he arrives at Jantar Mantar on Sunday (March 1) to address his supporters and implore them to be prepared for the fight ahead.

Also read: Kejriwal calls excise case ‘biggest political conspiracy’ after Delhi court discharge

A senior AAP leader close to Kejriwal told The Federal that though the AAP chief would be “seen more regularly” in Delhi now, it will be some time before he returns full-time to his street-fighting ways in the national capital. “He will surely be more involved with making our plans for Delhi, but he may not be leading them full time for now; that will be left to people like Atishi (Leader of Opposition in the Delhi Assembly), Saurabh Bharadwaj, Somnath Bharti and others. Kejriwal’s priority right now is to ensure that our party retains Punjab, where polls are due early next year, and expand further in Gujarat (due for elections in 2027-end). He also has to oversee the expansion plans of the party in other states and then lead our charge against the BJP nationally, too,” the senior AAP leader explained.

AAP-Congress rift

It is this apprehension, the court’s decision in the liquor scam case could give a fresh boost to AAP’s expansion drive, which is also expected to intensify the already existing friction between Kejriwal and the Congress party. In Delhi, which the Congress ruled for 15 years between 1998 and 2013, the party has been so utterly obliterated by the AAP that it has failed to get a single candidate elected to the Delhi Assembly in the last three election cycles. In Punjab too, the AAP’s unprecedented victory in 2022 had come after decimating the Congress and in the BJP bastion of Gujarat, Kejriwal’s comrades have been consistently chipping away at the Congress’ base among Dalits, backward castes, tribals and even a section of the Patidars.

Also read: BJP alleges Kejriwal allotted '7-star' bungalow in Chandigarh; AAP hits back

Expectedly then, the Congress was quick to smirk at reports of Kejriwal and Sisodia being discharged in the liquor scam case days after the Enforcement Directorate received the sanction to prosecute veteran Congress leader P Chidambaram for his alleged role in the INX Media case. For the Congress, the relief for Kejriwal and other AAP members in the liquor scam case is not the culmination of a bona fide judicial process but a reprieve facilitated by the BJP to its “convenient allies”.

In the wake of the court’s order, Pawan Khera, the Congress’s media department chief, had called him a “shape-shifter, a wishful serpent (ichchhadhari naag)” and insinuated that the clean chit to Kejriwal was necessitated because “elections are coming.”

“So the script is predictable. Cases against Congress leaders will suddenly accelerate,” Khera had said, citing the sanction to prosecute Chidambaram days before the Election Commission is scheduled to announce the poll schedule for Tamil Nadu and other states, while adding that “proceedings against their (the BJP’s) convenient allies in the AAP and others will quietly vanish in light of the Gujarat and Punjab elections”.

BJP under fire

Kejriwal was quick to hit back at Khera, asking the latter why neither Sonia Gandhi nor Rahul Gandhi had been jailed despite the cases foisted against them while all senior leaders of the AAP were arrested in the liquor scam case. That’s a question to which the Congress may not have a ready answer, but it’s one that AAP sources say Kejriwal is expected to ask the public on a loop each time he addresses a rally or press conference in Delhi, Punjab, Gujarat or elsewhere.

Also read: Delhi elections | Five reasons why AAP and Kejriwal bit the dust

The relief for Kejriwal also exacerbates another long-running complication for the Congress – its engagement with allies in the INDIA bloc on sundry issues. Given that most Opposition leaders today find themselves embroiled in multiples cases foisted by various central probe agencies, they all – with the exception of their Congress colleagues – see in Kejriwal’s exoneration a chance to hit back at the BJP.

Be it Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress or MK Stalin’s DMK and Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party; all have unequivocally welcomed the decision in the liquor scam case. That in its stinging observations against the CBI, the court has also stressed that the Prevention of Corruption Act and other laws cannot become a “device to convert political accusations into prosecutable offences” is now being cited by Opposition parties as not just an indictment of the probe agency but of the BJP-led Centre itself.

‘Game on for Kejriwal’

Over the past decade, the Congress has repeatedly alleged that the Centre was using its probe agencies to harass, intimidate and coerce Opposition leaders. For the AAP and other INDIA bloc parties, the Delhi court’s order in the case against Kejriwal is a vindication of that same charge but, ironically, the Congress finds itself unable to say so publicly. The AAP, on the other hand, has earned a chance to pull out all its ammunition and line up the firing squad in front of the BJP.

Also read: One year of Rekha Gupta: No respite for Delhi despite triple-engine sarkar

That Kejriwal gets to exploit this present dynamic to his advantage as he endeavours to rebuild the AAP – predictably at the Congress’ expense – must worry the Congress leadership and, arguably, bring cheer even to the BJP despite the court’s indirect rap on the Centre’s knuckles.

For Delhi’s political landscape, numb for the past year with an absentee Opposition, an underperforming government and a gaffe-prone, self-absorbed chief minister, the court’s order promises a return to the cacophony of the past. It’s game on for Team Kejriwal.