New Delhi 

AAP Chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest is a blow to the nascent Congress-AAP alliance in Delhi and Haryana and hobbles AAP in the middle of the Lok Sabha election campaign. The BJP is confident it will generate no sympathy for AAP or Kejriwal among the voters. 

“He should have been arrested a year ago. Our party high command should not have waited this long. Kejriwal is corrupt, and so are his other leaders, Sanjay Singh, Manish Sisodia, and Satyender Garg. They are all in jail for many months. No one in Delhi has shed a tear,” Om Prakash Sharma, BJP MLA from Vishwas Nagar, Delhi, told businessline. 

The first big problem AAP faces is the logistical nightmare of running a government from jail. Kejriwal is the second sitting Chief Minister after Hemant Soren of Jharkhand in recent times to have been arrested. While Soren resigned before his arrest and his colleague Champai Soren was appointed CM, AAP has made it quite clear that no one will be appointed in Kejriwal’s stead. “We have received news that ED has arrested Arvind Kejriwal. We have always said that Arvind Kejriwal will run the government from jail. He will remain the CM of Delhi,” said Delhi Finance Minister Atishi Marlena. 

But there is uncertainty about how that will pan out in the coming months. Already, a session of the Delhi Assembly on Friday was cancelled, and the assembly was scheduled to meet again on March 27. “This is how they plan to run the government now,” said Sharma. 

The other issue is the campaign and coordination with alliance partners. Kejriwal was at the core of the political strategy to cobble up an alliance with the Congress which saw a seat-sharing arrangement in Delhi where AAP will contest four seats and Congress will contest three. No alliance has been announced for Punjab, but Kejriwal managed to get a very reluctant Congress to agree to allotting them one seat in Haryana. AAP is expected to contest the Kurukshetra seat in Haryana where the ruling BJP has seen dwindling popularity and has only recently changed its chief minister in the hope of curbing the anti-incumbency factor. Additionally, AAP has been bargaining hard with the Congress to allot it the Bharuch seat in Gujarat which is the home ground of the late Ahmad Patel. 

In all these negotiations, Kejriwal has been the strategist. Going ahead, he is also the star attraction in AAP’s election campaign. “The party will feel his absence acutely,” said an AAP worker. 

The arrest has evoked sympathetic voices from the Opposition with the Congress, DMK, CPM, Trinamool Congress and others joining in to condemn it but whether it brings the elusive “opposition unity” is still questionable. The most forceful voice in Kejriwal’s support was Congress leader Rahul Gandhi who said that the arrest shows that a “scared dictator wants to create a dead democracy”. Rahul reportedly spoke to Kejriwal’s family and was expected to visit his residence on Friday evening. 

“This arrest has only one motive and that is to cripple AAP. What the BJP is telling the people of Delhi and indeed, the people of Jharkhand (with Hemant Soren’s arrest) that no matter who they vote for, the BJP and the PM will decide who will govern. I hope that the people will respond to this. But I cannot predict what will happen. Right now, the only thing that is clear is that the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of the ruler,” said political activist and academician Yogendra Yadav. 

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