The Aam Aadmi Party is fighting with its back pushed to the wall, a bit flustered, a lot angry, highly disconcerted, and every bit seemingly disappointed and filled with moral consternation.
After the arrest of its minister Satyendra Jain by the Enforcement Directorate for money laundering, it is now the time of several leaders, including deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia to face the probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the Delhi liquor scam.
It has been, understandably, the political argument of the Aam Aadmi Party that it is a victim of political witchhunt and is being framed by the BJP-led Centre, which is misusing the Central agencies like the CBI, Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the income tax department, among others.
In this, if not on any other, most of the Indian political opposition is united and they make the allegation with a near-consensus that the BJP at the Centre is misusing its agencies to frame and fix those who are opposed to it politically and electorally.
It was an argument that Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamul Congress Party has made in West Bengal and an argument that Uddhav Thackeray’s unit of the Shiv Sena has been making. Earlier, it was the Grand Old Party, the Congress, which alleged its top leadership was being framed, harassed and arm-twisted in the National Herald case, in which an ailing Sonia Gandhi and her son, Rahul Gandhi were summoned.
From down south, it has been echoed with shrill vigour by the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) chieftain K. Chandrashekar Rao, whose daughter K. Kavitha and other family members are reportedly also under the watch of the agency in the same case as Mr Sisodia’s.
The ruthless realpolitik at play, however Machiavellian, must be endured. It would be easy to take a high moral ground, and indict the BJP over the allegation but the truth is they did not invent the game, only perfected it.
