Indian Supreme Court releases Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on bail as general elections continue

New Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, one of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s staunchest critics, was released from jail on Friday after the country’s Supreme Court ordered his release on temporary bail.

The politician and the capital city’s chief executive, who is also a key opposition leader in the opposition coalition against Modi, has also been allowed to campaign during the ongoing general elections in India.

Kejriwal was detained in March following a long-running corruption investigation.

He is one of several leaders of the group to come under criminal investigation, with one of his associates describing his arrest a month before the elections as a “political conspiracy” hatched by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Supreme Court Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Dutta said Kejriwal can remain out of custody till June 1, the last day of voting in the six-week election.

The Kejriwal government was accused of corruption when it implemented a policy of liberalizing liquor sales in 2021 and giving up lucrative government stake in the sector.

The policy was rolled back the following year, but an investigation into the alleged corrupt allocation of licenses resulted in the jailing of two top Kejriwal aides.

Rallies were held in several other major cities across India following his arrest in support of Kejriwal, who has consistently denied wrongdoing.

Kejriwal, 55, has been chief minister for nearly a decade and first came to office as a staunch anti-corruption crusader.

He had resisted multiple summons from the Enforcement Directorate, India’s financial crimes agency, for questioning as part of the investigation.

‘Target political opponents’

Modi’s political opponents and international rights groups have long sounded the alarm over India’s shrinking democratic space.

US think-tank Freedom House said this year that the BJP had “increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents”.

Rahul Gandhi, the most prominent member of the opposition Congress party and scion of a dynasty that dominated Indian politics for decades, was convicted of criminal defamation last year following a complaint by a member of Modi’s party.

His two-year prison sentence briefly disqualified him from parliament until the verdict was suspended by the High Court, but raised concerns over democratic norms in the world’s most populous country.

Both Kejriwal and Gandhi are members of an opposition alliance made up of more than two dozen parties that is jointly contesting India’s elections.

But even without criminal investigations targeting its most prominent leaders, few expect the faction to make inroads against Modi, who remains popular a decade after he first took power.

Many analysts view Modi’s re-election as a foregone conclusion, partly due to the resonance of his vocal Hindu-nationalist politics with members of the country’s majority faith.