India’s finance minister on Monday filed a defamation suit against Delhi’s leader who had accused him of large-scale corruption in his former role as head of the capital’s cricket association.
Arun Jaitley personally went to a Delhi court under tight security to sue Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and five other members of his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for making “false and defamatory” statements against him and his family members.
The minister sought Rs 100 million ($1.5 million) in damages over Kejriwal’s “baseless and wrong” allegations that he misused funds during his 13-year tenure as president of the Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA) that ended in 2013.
“Jaitley has not taken any pecuniary advantage from DDCA at all. There are DDCA records which can be summoned,” his lawyer Siddharth Luthra told the court, according to the Press Trust of India.
“These statements by the AAP leaders are politically motivated,” he added.
A bitter war of words erupted between the two last week when federal investigators raided Kejriwal’s Delhi office in connection with a corruption case involving his principal secretary.
Kejriwal in turn accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of waging a political vendetta and branded him as “a coward and a psychopath”, alleging officers were sent to find files related to “the DDCA scam that implicates Jaitley”.
