A day after Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia’s office saw a visit by CBI officials amid probe in the excise policy case, the ruling Aam Aadmi Party in the national capital has hit out at the probe agency. The Delhi Deputy Chief Minister on Saturday said his Delhi Secretariat office was raided even as the agency said otherwise. Addressing a presser on Sunday, the AAP’s chief spokesperson Saurabh Bharadwaj said: “If something is found, it’s a raid… if nothing is found, it’s not. When the office opens, anybody can come. They (CBI) should write a letter when they visit. It’s Deputy Chief Minister’s office, not India Gate that anybody would go there.”
“The officials went when it was an off day. Whatever they wanted, they took How can this be a casual visit? They will call it a raid when they find something,” the AAP leader further said. On Saturday, an official was quoted as saying by HT in a report that “there was no raid”. “No one was questioned. No summons was issued. We took one computer from his office as part of the probe,” he said.
Hours before this, Sisodia had hit out at the agency in a sarcastic tweet. “Today, the CBI has once again reached my office. They are welcome. They earlier raided my home, probed my office, investigated my lockers and even reached my village for investigation but they could not find anything against. They will not find anything as I have not done anything wrong. I have only worked honestly for the education of Delhi’s children,” he wrote in Hindi.
Sisodia was named as an accused in the liquor policy case over Delhi excise policy, which has now been scrapped. In the first charge sheet in November, however, his name was not there. The agency later that the probe was ongoing. The AAP has repeatedly claimed that accusations of corruption in the matter are baseless and politically-motivated.
Meanwhile, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday yet again targeted AAP as it said that the Deputy Chief Minister was only “dramatising a routine inquiry as a raid”. “It is intriguing that Sisodia and other AAP leaders often say that they welcome probe by any investigative agencies but when the same agencies probe a case against them, they raise hue and cry, and play the victim card,” said Delhi BJP working president Virendra Sachdeva.
