On Thursday night last week, when the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested Arvind Kejriwal, the customary word of support started to emerge from the opposition ranks. Congress Delhi state president Arvinder Singh Lovely along with a former president Subhash Chopra and a former member of the Lok Sabha Sandeep Dikshitvisited Kejriwal’s residence that night to stand in solidarity.The presence of the former MP, who criticised the arrest in strong words, spoke of the quantum of irony the whole situation contained. Arvind Kejriwal started his career promsing to jail this former MP’s late mother Sheila Dikshit. Kejriwal got catapulted to the centrestage of politics undergoing a 14-day fast in 2013 to put pressure on the then Sheila Dikshit government for action over ‘inflated’ water and electricity bills.Despite taking Delhi on the path of unprecedented development in terms of both infrastructure and services and creating a culture of citizen first, Dikshit was handed over a humiliating end to her tenure by voters of Delhi, who preferred Kejriwal’s ‘gurantee’ of free power and free water to a life of quality.He had defeated Sheila Dikshit in the New Delhi constituency by a margin of 22,000 votes in his poll debut in 2013.Though Sandeep Dikshit was there to stand in solidarity, somewhere he must have felt avenged that the man who threw baseless charges of corruption on his mother was being taken into custody in a corruption case. The irony in his arrest was further reflected in the statement of anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare, who once groomed Kejriwal. While Kejirwal called Anna his guru, the latter was soon to disown the Delhi chief minister as his protégé. Hazare said, “I felt bad that Arvind Kejriwal who used to work with me and raised his voice against liquor, is himself making liquor policy.”
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