With less than a month to go before India’s general election, when Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is widely expected to retain power, the opposition coalition is a shambles. This is only partly its own doing. India’s law-enforcement agencies have played a not insignificant role.
On March 21st the Enforcement Directorate (ED), a federal agency tasked with investigating large-scale economic offences, arrested Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi, a leading figure in the main opposition alliance and a thorn in the side of the prime minister.
The arrest had been widely expected. The ED has “summoned” Mr Kejriwal for questioning nine times since October, which he gleefully and publicly ignored. Yet the news, when it broke late on March 21st, was still a shock. It is the first time in India’s history that a sitting chief minister has been arrested. And it is only the latest misfortune to strike the anti-BJP coalition.
In January the chief minister of Jharkhand, an opposition-run eastern state, resigned just hours before he too was arrested by the ED, in his case on suspicion of money-laundering.
This week the Congress party, the only big national party other than the BJP, said its bank accounts had been frozen by the tax authorities over alleged undeclared cash income of 1.5m rupees ($18,000), or about 0.07% of its total donation income, in the 2017-18 financial year.
Maybe the timing is pure coincidence. The government says law-enforcement agencies are merely doing their job. The bjp rode to power in 2014 on, among other things, popular disgust with corruption. The last term of the previous, Congress-led, coalition had been marked by a seemingly never-ending cascade of exposés by India’s then muckraking media.
Many voters remain wedded to the idea that Mr Modi is incorruptible. Some believe that applies to his party too.
Perhaps it is true. That would explain why the ed and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), another law-enforcement agency, both of which are controlled by the central government, have been so energetic in their investigations of parties other than the BJP. Some 95% of the agencies’ investigations since 2014 have focused on the opposition. Under the Congress-led coalition over the previous ten years, just 54% of ed investigations and 60% of CBI ones went after the opposition, according to an investigation by the Indian Express, a national daily.
The BJP’s halo extends to new members too. The agencies have ceased or eased investigations against opposition politicians after they defected to the ruling party.
The particulars of the case against Mr Kejriwal relate to a new liquor policy introduced by his government in 2021. The ED and the CBI allege that Mr Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) received around 1bn rupees in kickbacks from a group of businessmen in exchange for lucrative alcohol licences.
Two other senior AAP lieutenants are already in jail pending trial as part of the case, including Mr Kejriwal’s deputy, who was arrested in February 2023. The ED says Mr Kejriwal has failed to co-operate with the probe and that his arrest is necessary to establish what role he played in the alleged corruption. Though the agency has conducted multiple raids and arrested a total of 16 people in the probe, none of the accused have yet been put on trial. AAP says the investigation is a political conspiracy.
The irony is that Mr Kejriwal rose to political prominence as a campaigner against graft under the previous Congress-led government. The symbol of his party is a broom, signifying the sweeping away of corruption. Other opposition leaders rallied behind Mr Kejriwal. “A scared dictator wants to create a dead democracy,” Rahul Gandhi, figurehead of the Congress, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister of Kerala, called Mr Kejriwal’s arrest “outright vicious and part of a callous plot to silence all opposition voices just ahead of the general elections”.
MK Stalin, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, said it laid bare the BJP’s abuse of power and the “decay of democracy”.
Mr Kejriwal has consistently denied wrongdoing, and justified his refusal to appear for questioning before the ED by calling the summons “illegal”. He is challenging his arrest in court. But whatever the judges decide, the saga will probably hurt the opposition more than the BJP.
If Mr Kejriwal remains in jail, the opposition alliance will be deprived of a crucial campaigner. Even if he is released, he will have been robbed of some of his moral power, and his image is likely to be tarnished.
Source: The Economist
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