AAP holds nationwide protests, top leadership slams BJP over Sisodia's arrest

New Delhi, Feb 27 (IANS) The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday held nationwide protests against the arrest of Delhi's Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia by the CBI in connection with the 2021-22 excise policy case.

The party workers held protests in Delhi, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, among other paces.

At the AAP headquarters in Delhi, hundreds of party workers and supporters, including the top AAP leadership, gathered to protest against the arrest of Sisodia, who was sent to five-day CBI remand by a Delhi court on Monday.

AAP leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh termed Sisodia's arrest as a well-planned conspiracy hatched by the BJP, and claimed that it has bben carried out at this point in time to deflect the questions that are being raised by the people of the country over the link between the Adani Group and the BJP-led Central government.

Holding a press conference at the party headquarters here, Singh claimed that the Central government is involved in scams worth not a few thousand but lakhs of crores of rupees and therefore to deflect the blame from their misdeeds, they have decided to arrest Sisodia on a 'fake' case.

He pointed out that this was done despite there being no evidence to arrest the Deputy CM, adding that Sisodia's house was raided for over 14-hours but nothing was found there.

Singh also highlighted how raids were conducted by the probe agencies at Sisodia's office and ancestral village, but without any success.

Despite this, the CBI has now accused Sisodia of receiving a bribe of Rs 10,000 crore, Singh said as he alleged that it has been crafted to deflect the blame from the scams that have taken place involving the BJP of late.

AAP's Delhi convenor and Cabinet minister Gopal Rai questioned the CBI's actions, stating that Sisodia has been presenting himself before the CBI whenever summoned and that the CBI had no response to the court's question as to why it required his five-day remand.

Rai said that AAP will keep cooperating with the investigation, but if the arrest is a means to spread terror among the people, they will answer back.

AAP MLA Atishi alleged that Narendra Modi is running Delhi like a dictator and claimed that Delhi Police openly entered the AAP office and dragged party workers out from inside.

She added that AAP workers were protesting peacefully inside the party headquarters when they were physically dragged out by Delhi Police and detained.

Earlier on Monday, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had tweeted, "I am told that most CBI officers were against Manish's arrest. All of them have huge respect for him and there is no evidence against him. But the political pressure to arrest him was so high that they had to obey their political masters."