Trinamool leads Opposition protest against Manish Sisodia’s arrest; Congress silent
Delhi Deputy Chief Minister and senior Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Manish Sisodia was arrested on Sunday evening by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) after an eight-hour-long interrogation. He was being questioned in connection with alleged irregularities related to the issuance of liquor licenses in Delhi.
After the arrest, Mamata Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) was the first Opposition party to raise its voice against the act, which was just the latest example of the BJP’s increasing use of agencies like CBI, Enforcement Directorate (ED), Income Tax Department (IT) and others to scare the Opposition to submission.
Yesterday evening itself, Trinamool’s Rajya Sabha leader Derek O’Brien tweeted that had Manish Sisodia “got himself a #BJP brand of washing machine” (implying his joining BJP), “he would never been arrested”, and congratulated the AAP leader with a “Bravo, Manish” for not giving in to the pressure.
He also lauded the way K Chandrashekar Rao’s Bharat Rashtra Samithi, Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena, Nitish Kumar’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and CPI(M) have stood by the ruling party in Delhi and Punjab.
Surprisingly, for nearly 24 hours after the arrest, the Congress high command remained silent on the issue.
It was only late today that the party’s communications chief Jairam Ramesh tweeted a statement, but that too a general statement about “instruments of political vendetta & harassment under Modi Sarkar” and Opposition leaders being “selectively targeted to destroy their reputation”.
