NEW DELHI: India’s top court on Friday ordered the release of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s jailed rival on bail, allowing him to campaign in the ongoing national elections.
Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s chief minister and the main leader of the opposition alliance formed to challenge Modi in the elections, was arrested in March in connection with a long-running corruption probe.
Among several blog leaders on the criminal investigation, one of his colleagues described his arrest a month before his arrest as a “political conspiracy” orchestrated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.
Supreme Court Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta said Kejriwal could be released from jail by June 1, the last day of voting in the six-week election.
Kejriwal’s government has been accused of corruption while implementing a policy to liberalize the sale of liquor by 2021 and divest the government’s lucrative stake in the industry.
The policy was withdrawn in the following year, but an investigation into the distribution of corrupt licenses has since seen two of Kejriwal’s key allies arrested.
Rallies in support of Kejriwal, who has consistently denied wrongdoing, were held in other major Indian cities after his arrest.
Kejriwal, 55, has been prime minister for nearly a decade and was first launched as an anti-corruption crusader.
India’s financial crime agency denied repeated calls by the Enforcement Directorate to be questioned as part of its probe.
