Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal speaking to NDTV's Barkha Dutt
Arvind Kejriwal said today he did not regret calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi a
"coward and a psychopath" in his outburst on twitter as the CBI raided his offices earlier this month.
"I don't regret anything. I accept I use bad language, I speak from the heart," the Delhi Chief Minister said in an exclusive interview to NDTV. He added caustically: "The PM uses flowery language...but his actions are not good."
He accused the ruling BJP of using all central agencies to target him and declared: "Kejriwal is not scared of the CBI, order any inquiry against me."
Mr Kejriwal referred to
PM Modi's surprise visit to Lahore on Nawaz Sharif's birthday last week to press home a point on what he said was incessant interference. "I appeal to you...we don't want any fight. You can befriend Pakistan, yet you won't let
Arvind Kejriwal work," he said.
Challenging the CBI to "send 100 officers to the Delhi Secretariat and look into every file in my office", the Chief Minister insisted that the
raid on his top officer Rajender Kumar was the cover for an attempt to look at a file that had details of alleged corruption in Delhi's cricket body DDCA (Delhi and District Cricket Administration), which was headed by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for 13 years till 2013.
Last week, Mr Kejriwal ordered an inquiry headed by former Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium into DDCA corruption.
"Mr Jaitley was repeatedly told many times about the corruption. He was president for 14 years and a scam took place on such a large scale. The moment we said there is corruption in the DDCA, Mr Jaitley filed a defamation suit against us."
When it was pointed out that the finance minister was never formally named in the alleged DDCA scam, Mr Kejriwal said no investigation report had ever named anyone.
"It is almost like no one killed Jessica Lal. There was corruption, but ghosts did it," he quipped.
On the Centre questioning the validity of the inquiry set up by his government, Mr Kejriwal said he was aware that Home Minister Rajnath Singh had sent a file on the subject to PM Modi.
"My information is that Rajnath Singh has sent the file to PM Modi and now the PM has to decide whether the inquiry will be allowed or not. But we don't care...our inquiry is on," Mr Kejriwal said.