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Taking on the Enforcement Directorate (ED) over the purported inclusion of AAP Rajya Sabha member Sanjay Singh’s name in a chargesheet related to the alleged liquor scam “by mistake”, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday took to Twitter, saying, “Can somebody’s name be added to a chargesheet by mistake? It’s clear that the entire case is fake.”
He charged Prime Minister Narendra Modi with doing “dirty politics” to defame the country’s “most honest party” and stop its expansion. He added that such behaviour does not behove the PM.
On April 22, Mr. Singh sent a legal notice to ED asking it to issue a public apology for including his name in the chargesheet filed in connection with the now-scrapped excise policy “without any evidence”.
The senior AAP leader had a week earlier, on April 13, told the media that he would file a defamation suit against the probe agency officials.
On Wednesday, AAP shared the ED’s purported response to Mr. Singh’s notice, in which the agency attributed the mention of “Sanjay Singh” instead of “Rahul Singh” in one instance to an “inadvertent typographical/clerical error”.
As per the letter shared by AAP, ED moved an application before the court concerned as a “correctional measure” on April 20 as soon as the error was noticed.
The fact that the agency had moved the application “much prior” to Mr. Singh’s legal notice “demonstrates the bona fide of the agency”, the letter stated, adding that “the imputations and aspersions” cast on the agency “are ill-advised, baseless and devoid of merits”.
‘Political pawn’
Senior AAP leader and Delhi Minister Saurabh Bharadwaj on Wednesday lashed out at the probe agency for functioning like a “political pawn”. He accused the agency of receiving instructions from the PMO to falsely implicate AAP leaders in various cases.
“The Central government and its agencies have been exposed. The manner in which the Prime Minister is trying to target Arvind Kejriwal and other AAP leaders is out in the open today,” he said.
Meanwhile, Delhi BJP chief Virendra Sachdeva said ED, in its response to Mr. Singh’s notice, had only admitted to naming the AAP leader erroneously in one instance in the chargesheet.
“For that mistake, ED undertook corrective steps much before Sanjay Singh’s notice,” Mr. Sachdeva said. He added that Mr. Singh’s name is still part of the ED chargesheet.
“Had Mr. Singh and other AAP leaders read the ED response carefully, they would have realised that the probe agency has not acquitted him,” the BJP leader said.
