‘No level playing field’: Day after Kejriwal’s arrest, INDIA bloc lodges protest with EC

Shubhadeep Choudhury

New Delhi, March 22

In a show of solidarity with arrested Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, opposition INDIA bloc constituents today presented a memorandum to the Election Commission, urging it to take steps to prevent the alleged misuse of probe agencies and ensure there was level playing field for all parties.

Meeting the EC a day after the AAP supremo’s arrest by the Enforcement Directorate, representatives of seven INDIA bloc parties said actions by agencies such as the ED, CBI and the Income-Tax department “targeting political opponents were contrary to law”. “It is part of the BJP’s strategy to put opposition parties at a disadvantage before the elections,” they said.

The memorandum urged the EC to invoke Article 324 of the Constitution and issue a circular to ensure that any further raid, investigations and arrests were first vetted and approved by the EC or a committee set up under it.

The memorandum also urged the EC to launch investigations against all those individuals and officers who had “misused” their offices to harass the leaders of opposition parties. KC Venugopal and Abhishek Manu Singhvi of the Congress, Derek O’Brien and Mohd Nadimul Haque of the Trinamool Congress, Sitaram Yechury of the CPM, Sandeep Pathak and Pankaj Gupta of AAP, Jitendra Awhad of the NCP (Sharad Pawar), P Wilson of the DMK and Javed Ali of the Samajwadi Party (SP) were part of the meeting in which all the three members of the EC were present.

The memorandum said that in a span of a few weeks, the central agencies had arrested two democratically elected Chief Ministers (Kejriwal and Jharkhand counterpart Hemant Soren), both of whom vocally opposed the BJP. “Their arrests are meant to send a message straight to the voter… that the ruling regime will not countenance any real opposition to its electoral ambitions,” they said.