NEW DELHI: Arvind Kejriwal, a top opponent of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, vowed to keep fighting ‘dictatorship’ before he returned to jail on Sunday, following elections widely expected to produce another landslide victory for the Hindu-nationalist leader.

Results are expected on Tuesday.

The chief minister of the capital Delhi and a key leader in the opposition parties’ alliance formed to compete against Modi, Arvind Kejriwal was among several opposition leaders under criminal investigation, with colleagues describing his arrest a month before the election began as a “political conspiracy orchestrated by Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)”.

He was released to campaign and ordered to return to jail once voting ended.

“When power becomes dictatorship, then jail becomes a responsibility,” said Kejriwal, who promised to continue fighting from behind bars. “I don’t know when I will return,” he told supporters in an emotional departure speech at his Aam Aadmi Party headquarters.

Results expected tomorrow

His party spokesman told AFP Kejriwal later returned to jail.

Supporters of Modi in his constituency of Varanasi — the spiritual capital of the Hindu faith — said they believed their leader’s win was secure. “His government is coming back,” said Nand Lal, selling flowers outside a temple.

Exit polls showed Modi was well on track to triumph, with the premier saying he was confident “the people of India have voted in record numbers” to re-elect the BJP government.

Voting in the seventh and final staggered round of the six-week poll ended this weekend, held in brutally hot conditions across swathes of the country. At least 33 polling staff died from heatstroke in Uttar Pradesh state alone, where temperatures hit 46.9 degrees Celsius, election officials said.

India’s top court granted Kejriwal bail last month, giving a fleeting boost to the opposition’s quixotic campaign to oust Modi, but ordered him to return to custody after the election.

Kejriwal, 55, has been chief minister for nearly a decade and first came to office as a staunch anti-corruption crusader. His government was accused of corruption when it implemented a policy to liberalise the sale of liquor in 2021 and give up a lucrative government stake in the sector.

The policy was withdrawn the following year but the resulting probe into the alleged corrupt allocation of licences has since led to the jailing of two top Kejriwal allies.

Target political opponents

Modi’s political opponents and international rights groups have long sounded the alarm about threats to India’s democracy.

US think tank Freedom House said this year 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 libel last year after a complaint by a member of Modi’s party.

His two-year prison sentence saw him disqualified from parliament until the verdict was suspended by a higher court and raised concerns over democratic norms in India.

Ex-CM of the eastern state of Jharkhand Hemant Soren was also arrested in February in a separate corruption probe.

Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi and Soren are all members of an opposition alliance comprising more than two dozen parties, but the bloc struggled to make inroads against Modi.

Published in Dawn, June 3rd, 2024