The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday alleged Manish Sisodia was asked to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and become its chief ministerial candidate against Arvind Kejriwal if the Delhi deputy chief minister wanted to get the cases against him closed, prompting a fresh war of words between the two parties.
The BJP and the AAP have held a series of press conferences and put out tweets to attack each other since the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday raided 31 locations, including Sisodia’s residence, in connection with alleged irregularities in the Delhi government’s Excise Policy 2021-22.
AAP’s chief spokesman Saurabh Bhardwaj said Sisodia refused to “backstab” his party and that the deputy chief minister was being targeted under a nationwide campaign to silence Opposition leaders. “Manish Sisodia responded saying his dream is to provide good quality education to every child of this country and not merely to become a chief minister.”
Bhardwaj said the BJP has projected many chief ministerial faces against Kejriwal such as Harshvardhan, Adesh Gupta, Satish Upadhyaya, and Manoj Tiwari but none of the could succeed. “Now, they wanted to use clean image and track record of Sisodia against Kejriwal but we are proud of him that he has refused to backstab his party.”
Bhardwaj alleged the BJP has since coming to power at the Centre in 2014 used a similar “modus operandi” of silencing political leaders and making them switch parties by filing corruption cases. “Suvendu Adhikari was a TMC [Trinamool Congress] leader and BJP ran a campaign against him in the Saradha chit fund scam…a CBI case was filed. Cases under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act were registered. He later joined the BJP and all the interrogations and raids stopped.”
Bhardwaj noted Adhikari is now BJP’s Opposition leader in West Bengal. “Similarly, Mukul Roy was at the receiving end of the BJP campaign and later he joined BJP…all the cases went to cold storage. Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam used to be a Congress leader. BJP ran a campaign against him under a water scam and now he is the BJP chief minister in Assam.”
He said agencies such as CBI should answer why all the cases against Opposition leaders go to cold storage as soon as they join the BJP. “From Narayan Rane in Maharashtra, Pema Khandu in Arunachal Pradesh, Baijayant Panda from Orissa, and Purushottam Sawariya in Gujarat, we have more than three dozen cases where the same model was followed. The number two and three leaders of Opposition parties in states are targeted and forced to switch parties,” Bharadwaj said.
He alleged the probe into the excise policy was part of a campaign to silence AAP. “For BJP, inflation may rise, unemployment may become unbearable, the rupee may be at historic low level but AAP and Opposition should not ask any questions. It is a campaign to silence any dissenting voice when benefits worth lakhs of crores are being provided by the BJP to their corporate friends in the form of loan waivers and tax rebates.”
Sisodia earlier in the day said he received a message from the BJP, offering withdrawal of all the cases if he spilt the AAP and crossed over to the BJP. “My response to the BJP is that I am a descendant of [16th-Century ruler] Maharana Pratap. I am Rajput. I will never bow before corrupt conspirators. All the cases against me are fake. They can do whatever they want to do,” Sisodia tweeted.
Adesh Gupta, the Delhi BJP chief, denied Sisodia and AAP’s claims as a drama to divert attention. “Now that he has failed to hide behind the education model and children, they want to use Maharana Pratap as a shield by claiming to be his descendant,” he said
Delhi BJP spokesman Praveen Shankar Kapoor said nobody can compete with Sisodia in making up fictional stories. “He should start writing Bollywood scripts now that his political career is over.”