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Journalism of Courage
With the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arresting Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo Arvind Kejriwal Thursday night in connection with the alleged liquor policy scam, Kejriwal became the first sitting CM to have got arrested by any agency.
The ED’s move came hours after the Delhi High Court refused to grant Kejriwal protection from the central agency’s coercive action.
Here is a look at several instances where former CMs and Union ministers were arrested or convicted over the decades.
On January 31 this year, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) executive president Hemant Soren was forced to step down as the Jharkhand CM just before he was arrested by the ED in a money laundering case linked to an alleged land scam. He has been in jail since. Following his arrest, the JMM handed over the mantle of the chief ministership to Champai Soren, the party veteran close to Hemant.
The first former CM to have been arrested was then AIADMK chief late J Jayalalithaa in 1996, when the DMK was in power in Tamil Nadu. Jayalalithaa was arrested on December 7, 1996, and sent to prison for a month on charges of corruption in the purchase of TV sets for villagers.
Jayalalithaa also became the first CM to have been convicted in a disproportionate assets case by a Bengaluru court in 2014. She faced disqualification as an MLA, losing the CM’s post following her conviction.
In what was alleged as “political vendetta”, the Tamil Nadu police picked up then DMK chief and ex-CM M Karunanidhi on June 30, 2001, from the house of his wife Rajathi Ammal in Chennai’s Mylapore, when Jayalalithaa was the CM. Murasoli Maran, the nephew of Karunanidhi, reached there and alleged that the DMK chief was beaten up while being taken out of the house. Consequently, Maran and his party colleague T R Baalu, the then Union ministers under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, were arrested for obstructing public servants performing their duties. Maran even reportedly sustained injuries in the scuffle with the police. This was said to be the first instance when serving Union ministers were arrested.
On July 25, 1997, Bihar CM Lalu Prasad was served an arrest warrant in the fodder scam. He stepped down from his post, made his wife Rabri Devi the CM, and went to jail for about four months before getting bail. He went to jail repeatedly since then, its total count till date being about six.
JMM chief and Hemant’s father Shibu Soren was convicted in December 2006 – when he was Union minister in the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government – in a case of conspiracy to kidnap and murder his private secretary Shashi Nath Jha. He resigned from the Union Cabinet and went to jail.
Shibu was however acquitted by the Delhi High Court later. In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld his acquittal, saying there was no evidence that the dead body exhumed was of his private secretary as the DNA samples did not match.
