AAP's Dinesh Mohaniya arrested: Modi, Jung handed Kejriwal a loaded gun

What are you gonna do when they come for you? Give Arvind Kejriwal more ammo to shoot at you To have the police pick up AAP lawmaker Dinesh Mohaniya while he was addressing a media conference is taking the fight to the gutter. Lt Governor Jung who is the second favourite target of Arvind Kejriwal couldn’t have done a more sterling job feeding the Delhi Chief Minister’s neurosis by sending in the police during the middle of a conference. Even though Modi is not linked even tenuously to these incidents, for Kejriwal, it is all orchestrated by him. The Lieutenant Governor owes an explanation. Kejriwal is now one of the two shotgun barrels in India that are hot with constant indignation (the other is our friend Subramanian Swamy). For him, Mohaniya’s arrest couldn’t have been better scripted. [caption id=“attachment_2855968” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Image courtesy: Twitter/@DineshMohaniya[/caption] One has to ask why a man like Jung would give Kejriwal such a splendid opportunity. Even if the LG had received orders to go for it, did it really have to be like this? Dredge for virtue and you find none, except that it gives Kejriwal so much more fun. Talk about playing into his hands. Would it really have mattered if Mohaniya had been arrested after the media had taken off? Did it have to turn into a spectacle more fitting for a B-grade movie? What did Kejriwal do? The moment he heard about it, he accused Modi of declaring an Emergency, and he got listeners. He roped in the citizens of Delhi and told them that Modi is now arresting, raiding and filing false cases against individuals that the good people of the capital elected. At this moment, blaming Modi is difficult because one cannot establish a nexus. The buck, for now, stops with the Lt Governor, and I think he owes the media an explanation for the intrusion. If he is guilty, throw the book at him. But till then, it seems particularly stupid to send the cops in to arrest a man in the middle of a media conference. The arrest reflects a bullying approach that is almost Nazi like in its persecution. The action was aggressive and petty, and gave the Modi government’s enemy number one Arvind Kejriwal a loaded gun. Didn’t anybody think it through and say, “Hey, don’t make it so dramatic; just take him in when he comes out. Let’s not give Kejriwal so much ammo.” That lack of intelligence is appalling. It is not as if the guy was armed or was holding people hostage. Such a dramatic arrest seemed like a bad move.