3 counts on which Kejriwal’s arrest has become a turning point in Indian politics

It has become clear that if you join the BJP, you get bail, but if you refuse to toe the line, you get jail.

File photo of Arvind Kejriwal | ANI

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest by the Enforcement Directorate has become a turning point in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election on three counts.

One, it has made democracy an electoral issue for the first time, cementing a popular perception that the Narendra Modi government has taken a dictatorial turn. It has not just opened the eyes of politically neutral people but also made some Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters acknowledge that the ED’s actions against the opposition reeked of a witch hunt.

Two, it has galvanised an embattled Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi as well as the wider Opposition, potentially binding the INDIA coalition with industrial glue. It was predicted that the AAP would crumble in the vacuum of Kejriwal’s absence, but, instead, the party has demonstrated resilience since the day of his arrest.

Three, the scale of the clampdown on Kejriwal and the AAP has established him as the leader Modi fears the most in the longer arc of time and politics.

Democracy is on the ballot

For several months now, Opposition parties have been claiming that the Modi government has skewed the electoral field in its favour. On the one hand, the BJP has monopolised communication spaces that parties use to reach voters, and on the other, it has cornered the lion’s share of political funding. However, while these pains have been felt by parties, ordinary people never quite understood this phenomenon. Now, Kejriwal’s arrest has suddenly made BJP’s persecution of its opponents ‘visible’.

In the AAP, people see a tremendous victim of the BJP’s excesses: Four of the topmost leaders of the party have been arrested by the ED without bail, including former ministers Manish Sisodia, Satyendar Jain, and Sanjay Singh. The scale of this clampdown on AAP is unprecedented, even against the BJP’s own record of repression. Notwithstanding one’s political preference, this event has elicited sympathy for the AAP.

Not a single day of the trial has commenced because the ED keeps adding thousands of pages of fresh supplemental chargesheets and then opposes bail, citing Section 45 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), which effectively says that bail can only be granted when the judge is prima facie satisfied of innocence. Judges refuse bail because without the trial commencing, they only have the agency’s charges to go by, so they find it uncomfortable to stick their necks out against the ED’s submissions. Therefore, bail is typically granted by the judges when the ED itself does not oppose bail.

It has become clear that if you join the BJP (or pay them protection money in some cases), you get bail, but if you refuse to toe the line, you get jail. Everyone saw how the BJP took the likes of Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal, and Himanta Biswa Sarma into its fold and investigative agencies experienced selective amnesia on cases against these leaders.

In the current matter, the most important person whose bail the ED did not oppose was Sarath Chandra Reddy. Reddy was called the ‘kingpin’ of the alleged liquor scam, accused of paying bribes to get liquor licences in Delhi. He denied ever meeting or talking to Kejriwal at first. Then the ED arrested him and opposed his bail indefinitely until seven months later, Reddy named Kejriwal in his statement. In the intervening period, Reddy’s companies donated Rs 59.5 crore to the BJP. He was allowed to become the ED’s prosecution witness and subsequently got bail. This is the first scam where the money trail reaches the accuser, the BJP, instead of the accused. What is fascinating is that the ED has only statements of such accused-turned-witnesses and no trail of any actual funds that were alleged to have been transferred to the AAP.

But Kejriwal’s arrest seems to have been a step too far for many, including the BJP’s own supporters. Talking to BJP supporters betrays their sense that perhaps their party had made an error. A C-Voter snap poll showed how 34.8 per cent of NDA voters, and 52 per cent of all voters, believed that Kejriwal’s arrest was likely to generate sympathy for the AAP.

More independent voters are seeing red too. One does not need to support AAP to realise that arresting the Delhi CM a month before the general election was effectively denying him the opportunity to compete against the BJP. That the BJP is a threat to democracy has been an intellectual position for some time. This moment marks the graduation of that sentiment to a more mainstream one. This sophisticated articulation of an autorickshaw driver explaining how the BJP is destabilising the country’s democratic framework should scare the party. As Manu Joseph pointed out in his recent column on this subject, nobody likes bullies because they are reminded of the time they were bullied. The last time this playbook was tried by an authoritarian in India was in 1977 after two years of the Emergency, and despite the initial glamour of the dictatorship, it did not end well for Indira Gandhi and she famously lost the election.

People’s right to choose their governments without coercion and foul play is taking centre stage as the national issue around which a national alliance is coalescing.

AAP’s terrific fightback

Since the day Kejriwal was arrested, speculation has been rife that a party whose top-rung leadership in Delhi had been taken out by the BJP may be in disarray. Instead, what we see is an AAP that is hitting the streets in full force. Led organisationally by the party’s general secretary Sandeep Pathak, and Delhi cabinet members, including Atishi, Saurabh Bhardwaj, Gopal Rai and others, the AAP has turned on the heat against the BJP. This is evidenced by the fact that in many parts of the city, Delhi Police has declared IPC Section 144 and is on notice round the clock, denying Kejriwal’s supporters the ability to gather in too many numbers, lest the crowd embarrass the BJP.

The arrest also brought together the INDIA alliance like nothing else did. A tentatively united alliance changed pace from its strategy of loosely coordinated messaging and spoke in one clear voice, with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s tweet striking at the crux of the issue: “Modi is a scared dictator”. Delhi’s Congress unit came out to Kejriwal’s residence in a grand gesture after 10 years of acrimony. The AAP and Congress have been bitter rivals in Delhi, but their ability to muster a united front at this time will allow their respective cadre the grace to work together. Pertinently, similar solidarity was seen in Goa as well where the AAP has announced support to Congress candidates. AAP and Congress workers protested Kejriwal’s arrest together. Several other leaders, including those of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Shiv Sena, Left parties, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), Trinamool Congress (TMC), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and others, spoke in one voice, condemning the dictatorial move of the government. Several top leaders of the INDIA coalition are expected to join a massive rally at the Ramlila Maidan on 31 March.

Why is Modi scared of Kejriwal?

In the popular book series Harry Potter, Dumbledore famously said: “Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do!” A paranoid Voldemort attempts to kill one-year-old Harry Potter because it is predicted that the baby will grow up to defeat him. We later learn that during that ghastly attempt, Voldemort transfers into Harry the powers that eventually lead to his own defeat. By arresting Kejriwal without him being convicted of anything, without presenting any documentary evidence against him, or even conducting a trial, PM Modi has created his own “worst enemy.”

Kejriwal has always been Modi’s worst nightmare. When Modi was declared the prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha election, his face helped the BJP to win big in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chattisgarh – but he was stopped by Kejriwal in Delhi. That year, Kejriwal, without a presence or party apparatus, dared him in Varanasi, winning a handsome 20 per cent of the vote. Modi had sensed something was wrong — after all, how could a political nobody come in second after him? Modi was a national figure with a decades-old party to back him. In 2015, Kejriwal denied Modi victory in Delhi once again, but this time, it was accompanied by humiliation. Modi’s seat of power would be governed by a pesky rival.

The idea that the people of his capital city would choose his arch-rival with a thumping majority was dangerous because it challenged his claim to be the undisputed mass leader, at least of North India. People remember Kejriwal calling Modi a “coward and psychopath”, but what they forget is that comment was in response to the Modi government taking a most unprecedented step. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had arrested Kejriwal’s most loyal and dependable ally in the bureaucracy, his principal secretary, IAS Rajender Kumar, on charges of corruption in an old case. Not only was he arrested, but he was also suspended and pushed out of the services — ending a decorated officer’s career. The message was clear: Do not work with Kejriwal, or else..

Kejriwal’s government was severely curtailed over the years by the Modi establishment. Delhi’s anti-corruption branch was taken over by the home ministry; successive lieutenant governors meddled in everyday affairs, forcing the AAP to repeatedly seek reprieve from the judiciary. Each time Kejriwal won in court, the BJP would find fresh ways to frustrate his government through the Delhi Police, Delhi Development Authority, and municipal corporations (run by BJP until 2022). It even took a massive regressive step and turned the wheel of time behind, significantly reducing the powers of the elected government over the bureaucracy (which the Supreme Court had given it) through its amendment of the Government of NCT of Delhi (GNCTD) Act.

Kejriwal persevered through it all and won a second time against Modi in 2020 with an equally massive margin — winning 62 out of 70 seats. If this was not enough, he even sought to expand nationally. AAP recorded a landslide win in Punjab in 2022, apart from winning two seats in the Goa assembly and five seats in the Gujarat assembly. Amit Shah was reported to have told all BJP state units to ensure AAP does not become the principal opposition party in any state. The implication was clear: AAP’s growth was setting off alarm bells in the BJP, especially with the party’s push to reform education and healthcare. That became impossible for the BJP to counter, which had just not been challenged on these issues before.

Kejriwal’s image of an honest, educated, and hardworking leader running a good government in Delhi is anathema to Modi’s megalomaniacal obsession with his own perceived and professed destiny as the sole saviour of India. But in attempting to nip Kejriwal in the bud, Modi is running the risk of bestowing on the CM the power to defeat him. The PM is providing him with a national (even international) profile, immense public sympathy, and most importantly, character building that prison time famously did for revolutionaries around the world.

Incidentally, in Harry Potter, Voldemort was misinformed — he didn’t have to kill Harry to become invincible. But in doing so, he picked his own vanquisher. Perhaps Modi has a lesson to learn from Voldemort.

Akshay Marathe is an AAP spokesperson and a public policy graduate from Harvard University. Views are personal.

(Edited by Humra Laeeq)