By Sakshi Dayal
NEW DELHI (Reuters) -Several members of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were detained on Wednesday at a demonstration demanding the resignation of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, an opposition leader who has been arrested in a corruption case.
The protest in the capital New Delhi prompted police efforts to disperse the crowd using water cannon and came a day after the Delhi High Court dismissed a plea challenging Kejriwal’s arrest, saying his detention was justified.
Kejriwal was arrested by the financial crime-fighting agency last month on allegations of corruption relating to Delhi’s liquor policy, ahead of general elections beginning on April 19 in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking a third term.
Kejriwal was sent to prison until April 15 and is currently lodged in Tihar jail, where he joined two other senior leaders of his party who were imprisoned in the same case.
Kejriwal filed an appeal against the decision in the Supreme Court on Wednesday but the top court rejected his plea for an urgent hearing, local media reported.
Protesting near the headquarters of Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the capital, BJP members chanted slogans calling the leader corrupt and a thief. Police hauled them into buses and removed them from the spot.
“A government cannot be run from prison … if Arvind Kejriwal does not resign, the law will do its work,” BJP’s Ramvir Singh Bidhuri, leader of opposition in the Delhi assembly, told ANI news agency.
AAP leaders, who maintain the case against Kejriwal is “fabricated”, said he would not resign.
The AAP suffered a fresh setback on Wednesday when Delhi’s Social Welfare Minister Raaj Kumar Anand resigned from his post and from the party, saying he did not want his name to be connected with “corrupt behaviour”.
AAP leaders said Anand may have quit due to a fear of enforcement agencies.
“We have said only one thing from the start, that the intention behind Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest is to break the party, to finish it,” AAP’s Sanjay Singh, who was granted bail in the same graft case last week, told reporters.
Nearly 30 opposition parties which have formed an alliance called INDIA, of which the AAP is a member, have spoken against Kejriwal’s arrest, saying such action against opposition groups is aimed at denying them a level playing field in the elections.
BJP and Modi’s government have denied the accusations and say enforcement agencies are only doing their job.
(Reporting by Sakshi Dayal; Editing by YP Rajesh, Devika Syamnath, William Maclean)
