Senior AAP leader Atishi claimed that the Enforcement Directorate was eager to check Arvind Kejriwal's phone to try and get the details of the party's strategy for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.
Delhi Chief Minister and AAP chief Kejriwal was arrested by the central probe agency on March 21 in the Delhi excise policy-linked money laundering case and is in its custody till April 1.
Slamming the ED for working as BJP's political weapon, Atishi said that Kejriwal's mobile phone was only a few months old and did not exist when the policy was formed and implemented. The central probe agency's insistence to check Kejriwal's phone proves that “it is the BJP and not the ED that wants to know what is there on Kejriwal's phone", she said at a press conference in New Delhi.
The excise policy was implemented in 2021-22 and the chief minister's current phone is just a few months old, Atishi said.
“The ED has said that Kejriwal's phone of that period is not available, and now, it wants the password of his new phone,” she said. "They want it because they will find in it details of AAP's Lok Sabha poll strategy, campaign plans, talks with INDIA bloc leaders and information regarding media and social media strategy.”
The INDIA bloc has been formed by some opposition parties, including the AAP, the TMC, the Congress, the DMK and the SP, to counter the BJP in the parliamentary polls.
The 2021-22 policy was scrapped following allegations corruption.
After US, UN also expresses concern
A day after the US reacted to Kejriwal's arrest and freezing of the Congress's bank accounts, a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the world body "hopes that in India and any country that is having elections, people's "political and civil rights" are "protected" and everyone is able to vote in a "free and fair" atmosphere.
Spokesperson for the Secretary-General Stephane Dujarric made these remarks on Thursday while he was responding to a question on the political unrest in India ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
“What we very much hope that in India, as in any country that is having elections, that everyone's rights are protected, including political and civil rights, and everyone is able to vote in an atmosphere that is free and fair,” Dujarric said at the daily press briefing Thursday.
On Wednesday, hours after India summoned a senior US diplomat to protest remarks on Kejriwal's arrest, Washington reiterated that it encourages fair, transparent, timely legal processes.
On the US diplomat being summoned in Delhi, US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “I'm not going to talk about any private diplomatic conversations. But of course what we have said publicly is what I just said from here, that we encourage fair, transparent, timely legal processes. We don't think anyone should object to that, and we'll make the same thing clear privately.”
Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) officials summoned Acting Deputy Chief of Mission Gloria Berbena to their office in South Block. The meeting lasted for more than 30 minutes.
On Thursday, India said the US State Department's recent remarks on the arrest of Kejriwal are "unwarranted" and asserted the country is "proud of its independent and robust democratic institutions" and committed to protect them from any form of undue external influences.
(With PTI inputs)
