The noise around CBI-ED action is “much more nasty and brutish, partisan and political, than before” and the BJP government “is conspicuously complicit in this”.
This was Indian Express’s hard-hitting editorial this morning in the context of Manish Sisodia’s arrest on Sunday. Sisodia, the deputy chief minister of Delhi, was arrested by the CBI in connection with “irregularities” in Delhi’s liquor policy. The CBI said he was “evasive” and uncooperative during an interrogation.
Yesterday, Sisodia was sent to custody for five days.
In its editorial, Indian Express said the law must “take its course” but Sisodia’s arrest “cannot be divorced from the larger political pattern” of central agencies being used to “target” opponents. The newspaper’s investigation last year revealed that since 2014, 95 percent of the CBI’s probes have been against opposition politicians. So, the arrest “revives questions about due process and political vindictiveness”.
As for the AAP, Express said it faces a “formidable challenge”: “It can’t brush it under the Gautam Adani carpet as some of its leaders have tried to do; it needs to come clean and explain, more convincingly than it has done so far, why it rolled back what it called its reformist policy.”
Deccan Chronicle also had an editorial on Sisodia’s arrest, focusing on the need for the case to “come to court quickly to give the dispensers of justice a chance to arrive at a conclusion quickly”.
“The point is simple,” it said. “Can the CBI and the ED, which have been investigating the Delhi liquor scandal for a couple of years, prove with clear forensic evidence that largescale graft was involved in this case? The spread of financial fraud is easy enough to see, but the task gets much harder when it comes to proving that fraud, exposing the money trail and pinning it all on the primary players in what are conspiracies to profit illegally.”
Meanwhile, a day after the arrest, the AAP protested against the BJP’s “vendetta politics”. But the protest hit a wall outside the BJP’s headquarters in Delhi. Watch our video to see what happened.
And to know more about the much-harangued liquor policy, read this report to make sense of the scam.
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