Supreme Court lawyer and AAP idealogue Prashant Bhushan said while he had not wanted the Delhi government to fall, the development has freed Arvind Kejriwal to campaign for the Lok Sabha polls.
“I hope he will contest a Lok Sabha seat. But, as yet, there has been no discussion as to which constituency he would contest from,” he told The Indian Express shortly after the high-pitched resignation drama on Friday evening.
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Elaborating on the immediate provocation for the Delhi chief minister’s resignation, Bhushan said it was very clear to the AAP that both the Congress and the BJP would not let it clear even minor initiatives, let alone the Jan lokpal Bill.
“What is happening in Parliament would have happened in the Delhi Assembly. The same script would have been repeated even if the Jan Lokpal draft was modified. They would have stalled everything we did. They do not want the people of Delhi to get direct democracy. What was the point in continuing in such a situation?” he said.
Speaking in the same vein as Kejriwal, Bhushan said he was convinced that the Congress and the BJP had declared an “all-out war” since the time the AAP government had registered an FIR against Mukesh Ambani and other “powerful people”.
“Mukesh Ambani told all of them that we cannot allow this government to continue and that is why there was a hardening of stand…,” the lawyer said.
Significantly, Bhushan argued that though governance in the capital would be in limbo, the FIR had been registered and could not be annulled. “I suspect they will replace the officers we posted in the Anti-Corruption Branch with more pliable people. But they can neither disband it nor make the FIR disappear. That case and investigation will have to proceed,” he said.
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On the impact of the 49-day stint of the AAP government, Bhushan said the public perception was and remains in his party’s favour.
“It is their (the Congress and the BJP) faces that have been tarnished in black. They are the ones looking bad, not us. How could we continue when the most important plank, the Jan lokpal Bill was being blocked and there were ugly scenes in the Assembly? I did not want the government to go but all of us wanted the Jan Lokpal to become law,” he said.
Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption.
Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More
