“Jail Officials Cancelled Atishi’s Meeting With Arvind Kejriwal”: Claims AAP MP

New Delhi:

Alleging the Tihar Jail administration cancelled Delhi Minister Atishi’s meeting with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal at the last moment, AAP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh on Wednesday said “Even the British rule did not see this kind of behaviour”.

According to PTI, Atishi’s name was added after Delhi Health Minister Saurabh Bharadwaj’s name on the list of visitors for Mr Kejriwal. She will be meeting him on April 29. PTI reported that Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot’s name will also be added to the list of visitors and he will be meeting Mr Kejriwal soon.

Addressing a press conference, Mr Singh said that Mr Bharadwaj and Atishi were supposed to meet the chief minister in Tihar.

“But Atishi’s meeting was not confirmed yesterday. Delhi Education Minister Atishi applied for the meeting and at the last moment her meeting was cancelled,” Mr Singh said.

“After her meeting was cancelled, party national general secretary (organisation) Sandeep Pathak was supposed to accompany Bharadwaj, but he was informed around 9.30 am today that even his meeting was cancelled,” he added.

PTI reported that Mr Pathak himself did not come.

Mr Singh questioned the reasons behind the move and feared that Mr Kejriwal might not even be allowed to meet his wife in future.

“You are cancelling an MP’s meeting, a minister’s meeting with Kejriwal. You had cancelled my meeting with him earlier. Tomorrow you might cancel the meeting with his wife. Even the British rule did not see this kind of behaviour,” he said.

An inmate is allowed to write down the names of 10 people, including his family, whom he is allowed to meet, he said.

“If any prisoner wants to meet any of these, he cannot be stopped from meeting these people,” he added.

Mr Singh said that he would be writing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena regarding the same.

“He is being meted out worse treatment than the one meted out to terrorists or hardcore criminals. They are allowed to meet in person their lawyers and their families but you are stopping his meetings,” he said.

“If he kept asking for insulin for 23 days and you did not provide it to him, why is he being provided the same insulin after 23 days? This means that we were right throughout that the CM’s life was being played with, a deep conspiracy was being hatched to kill him, which we have been saying again and again,” Mr Singh said.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader said that “no reason was given” for cancellation of the meeting.

Earlier in the day, Mr Bharadwaj had a 30-minute-long meeting with Mr Kejriwal.

“I had a half-an-hour meeting in the ‘mulakat jangla’. He said that people should not worry about him. He said he is strong and he will continue his fight with the blessings of the people of Delhi,” he told reporters after the meeting.

The ‘mulakat jangla’ is an iron mesh which separates the inmate from the visitor in a room inside the jail. A visitor and an inmate can talk to each other by sitting on different sides of the mesh.

Mr Kejriwal was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a money laundering case on March 21.

The chief minister has not stepped down post his arrest with the AAP asserting that he would continue to run the government from jail. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)