AA Edit | Kejriwal’s gambit may be a political masterstroke

Mr Kejriwal chose not to resign as chief minister after his arrest in March this year by the Enforcement Directorate in the excise policy scam under the draconian Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, which until now, made bail next to impossible. Mr Kejriwal was arrested by the CBI much later, “perhaps only to frustrate the grant of bail to Kejriwal in the Enforcement Directorate case” as Justice Ujjal Bhuyan observed in his order granting Mr Kejriwal bail in the CBI case, and he refused to quit post even after that.

While most parties other than those are part of the NDA had objected to Mr Kejriwal’s arrest and the misuse of Central agencies as political tools, the BJP and the Congress, which is AAP’s political opponent in Delhi, held him guilty of corruption and sought to corner him on that ground. In Delhi, he would have wanted to take no risk ahead of the state assembly elections, scheduled or early next year.

A politician with an ear to the ground, Mr Kejriwal knew his and the party’s energies will have to be spent to defend his continuance in office. The resignation would end all such questions, easily catapult him to the status of a martyr and would help him steal his opponents’ thunder with much ease. The party can concentrate on the work its government has done in the past 10 years and explain what it intends to do. It will also be beneficial for the party in the Haryana elections though its electoral impact could be unhelpful for the INDIA bloc.

Keeping politics apart, Mr Kejriwal’s resignation is a pointer to the dangers of a Union government going berserk while targeting its political opponents. Courts have pointed out that the Central agencies investigating the cases against Mr Kejriwal, his former deputy Manish Sisodia and several of his party colleagues have not been able to come up with evidence other than statements, mostly of approvers. However, given the delays and complexities of legal system in the country, the chief minister was made to cool his heels in jail. Only when the courts have come out with a firm position that bail is the rule — there is nothing new in it; it’s only an expansion of Article 21 of the Constitution — that he was able to step out of the jail.

The bail conditions would, however, have made him an ineffective administrator: He can see only select files and cannot go to the state secretariat. Conditions that ensure fair trial are part of the legal process everywhere but those which strip an accused of his normal functioning makes the very idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty stand on its head. This way, any chief minister can be targeted and rendered ineffective. It is for the courts to grapple with this situation and come out with a suitable solution which would ensure transparent trial while allowing the accused person to continue with his functioning as long as it does not interfere with the process of the law.