At around 2:45 pm, the police started cordoning off the AAP leaders as soon as Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann (seated fourth from right) left the area. Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) workers from Delhi and Punjab took to the streets of the national capital to protest the questioning of AAP national convenor and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in connection with the alleged liquor scam at the Centre. Bureau of Investigation (CBI) headquarters on Sunday.
The allegation that the now-expired 2021-22 excise policy of the Delhi government favors some dealers has been probed by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
The CBI headquarters, where the CM was questioned for over nine hours, was turned into a fortress, with multiple layers of barricading and heavy deployment of police and paramilitary forces.
At least 1,350 AAP leaders and workers were detained during the protests, police said.
The detainees, including Rajya Sabha members Sanjay Singh and Raghav Chadha, Delhi ministers Kailash Gehlot, Saurabh Bhardwaj and Atishi, Punjab minister Harjot Singh Bains and AAP national general secretary Sandeep Pathak were released later in the evening.
Soon after Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann arrived at the CBI headquarters with Kejriwal at around 11 am, the police started cordoning off the AAP leaders.
Speaking to The Hindu, Mr Singh said the AAP chief was called for questioning by the CBI after he spoke on the Modi-Adani issue in the Delhi Assembly.
“Nothing will come out of this probe as there is no scam. They [BJP] Want to crush Kejriwal because we have become a national party now.
After being taken into custody, Mr Chadha said in a tweet that the BJP was suffering from “Kejriwal-phobia” and wanted to crush “AAP” as “there is no one left in the country to challenge them”.
counterclaim
Earlier in the day, BJP leaders staged a sit-in at Rajghat to protest against some AAP MLAs comparing the AAP chief with Mahatma Gandhi and “insulting the Father of the Nation”.
Leading the protest, Delhi BJP chief Virendra Sachdeva said, “The day Kejriwal gets trapped, he remembers Mahatma Gandhi; Otherwise, they have even removed Gandhi’s portrait from the secretariat.”