Arun Jaitley accuses CM Kejriwal of creating controversy

New Delhi: Union minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday accused chief minister Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi high court of “creating a false controversy in the media” with regard to allegations of irregularities in DDCA (Delhi and Districts Cricket Association), leading a Congress MP to raise it in Parliament.

Testifying before joint registrar Pankaj Gupta in the civil defamation suit lodged against Mr Kejriwal and five AAP leaders, Mr Jaitley imputed motive on them saying the issue was raised due to the action taken by an investigating agency against a senior officer of the Delhi Secretariat.

In response to a query raised by Mr Kejriwal’s counsel, the senior BJP leader said that Congress MP K.C. Venugopal, being a “political opponent,” raised the issue in Parliament. “The defendants (Kejriwal and others), on account of their deliberate falsehood, succeeded in creating a false controversy in the media against me. Consequently, the issue was raised in Lok Sabha (December 21, 2015) by Mr K.C. Venugopal, a political opponent, and I immediately rebutted the same,” he said.

Mr Jaitley said he believed that the allegations levelled by the Congress MP in Parliament were not “independent” in nature as the contents were “similar” to those alleged by AAP leaders. 

“I do believe so because these were raised two years after I had left the DDCA by the defendants (Kejriwal and five other AAP leaders) in order to deflect attention from their own wrong-doings,” he said, adding, “The ripples of the media campaign that followed can be always felt in a House in a parliamentary democracy.”

The response came when senior counsel Anoop George Chaudhari and advocate Anupam Srivastav, appearing for Mr Kejriwal, put forth Mr Jaitley whether he had any evidence to indicate that the Congress MP’s allegations in the Parliament were not independent ones.