Delhi chief minister to be held for six days after arrest on corruption charges
An Indian court has ruled that Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, will be kept in custody for six days after his dramatic arrest on corruption charges.
Kejriwal, the top elected official for the Indian capital, was taken in by police on Thursday night as part of an investigation into an alleged scam involving kickbacks for alcohol licensing deals.
It was the first time a sitting chief minister has been arrested. Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi party (AAP) came to power in the city in 2015 on the back of an anti-corruption movement, and had repeatedly come into the crosshairs of the national government, which has increasingly shown itself intolerant of dissent.
Senior AAP leaders condemned the charges against Kejriwal as fabricated and politically motivated, accusing the government of targeting the opposition parties before the national election beginning on 19 April.
The AAP is part of a coalition of 27 parties who have united to fight against the prime minster, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government in the election under the acronym INDIA.
“This is a clear conspiracy to stop Kejriwal from taking part in the upcoming polls,” said the AAP minister Kailash Gahlot.
The agency that detained Kejriwal is under central government control. Government critics say it is one of several agencies that have been weaponised against the BJP’s political opposition.
In the court hearing on Friday, investigators described Kejriwal as the “kingpin” and “key conspirator” in the case known as the Delhi liquor scam, and sought to detain him for up to 10 days to determine the money trail. The judge granted them custody until 28 March, when Kejriwal will be brought back before the court.
Party leaders vowed that Kejriwal would remain as chief minister and would continue to govern behind bars. Speaking before his court appearance in Delhi, Kejriwal said: “Whether I stay in jail, or outside, my life will be dedicated to serving the nation.”
Kejriwal’s deputy minister, Manish Sisodia, has already spent a year in prison in the same case. Opposition party leaders have also been interrogated, arrested and jailed over the past year in other cases, including Rahul Gandhi, the former leader of the opposition Congress party, who was jailed in a defamation case.
Kejriwal’s party has announced it would be holding protests in the capital over the next four days against his detention. On Friday, several AAP leaders were picked up and detained by police after demonstrating in the capital.
The arrest of Kejriwal came on the same day that the Congress party, also part of the INDIA coalition, claimed that the BJP had frozen its accounts in a “trumped up” tax case from more than two decades ago, preventing it from being able to campaign.
Around $20m (£16m) belonging to Congress has been frozen by the income tax department, the party said. The Congress leader, Sonia Gandhi, described this as a “systematic effort to cripple the party financially”.