Congress MP Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday slammed the arrest of former Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a money laundering case.

“ED, CBI, IT etc are no longer government agencies. They are now the ‘Vipaksh Mitao Cell (Remove opposition cell) of the BJP. The BJP, itself sunk deep in corruption, is running a campaign to destroy democracy,” Gandhi said in a post on social platform X.

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Gandhi is currently leading the ‘Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra’ and will enter Jharkhand on February 2. The yatra will be held in two phases, covering 804 km in 13 districts over a period of eight days, the state Congress chief Rajesh Thakur had told PTI.

Earlier, Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge had also hit out at the ED action against Soren, whose party Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) is a member of INDIA bloc.

“Intimidating opposition leaders through draconian use of PMLA provisions is a part of BJP’s toolkit. The BJP continues to destabilise governments ruled by opposition through conspiracy,” Kharge had said in an X post.

Soren was arrested by the central probe agency after being questioned by the ED for more than eight hours. He submitted his resignation before the governor before his arrest, as the JMM and Congress MLAs picked senior minister Champai Soren to succeed him.

According to an ED official, the agency has evidence to prove that Soren was the key beneficiary in an alleged land scam, wherein a network of brokers and businessmen were working to create fake deeds of landed parcels by forging records in the registrar offices and further selling them off.

The ED has so far arrested 14 people in the case, including 2011-batch IAS officer Chhavi Ranjan who served as the director of the state’s Social Welfare Department and deputy commissioner of Ranchi.