Again Satyendar Jain has been arrested and yet again the same question that has been troubling the Delhi politics for the past four years: Is it the law getting a grip on corruption or is it the Centre planning such raids ahead of the electoral calendar? The Delhi government's Anti-Corruption Branch picked up the former water minister and five others, including the former chief executive of the Jal Board Udit Prakash Rai, on Tuesday evening on the probe into the way the contracts for the upgradation of the city's sewage treatment plants were awarded. Already by Wednesday morning, Jain was in Rouse Avenue Court and by the afternoon, Arvind Kejriwal was on social media, directly naming the Union Home Minister and claiming that an ACB officer had told him that there was no action plan to arrest him till Amit Shah called for it.

This one statement has now become the headline of the story, but the case through the story deserves the same attention as the accusation. The FIR, filed by the ACB in May last year, refers to various sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act, as well as cheating and criminal conspiracy under the Indian Penal Code. It is related to four tenders for augmentation of sewage treatment plants (STPs) in the city, at Pappankalan, Nilothi, Najafgarh, Keshopur, Coronation Pillar, Narela, Rohini and Kondli, which were floated in 2021 and awarded in October 2022 at a total cost of around Rs 1,943 crore as compared to Rs 1,546 crore estimated earlier. Investigators say the conditions imposed in the tender were closed to give preference to a particular technology standard that was only meet by a few companies, including Hyderabad-based Euroteck Environmental, thereby eliminating much competition in a project aimed at cleaning the river Yamuna.

The BJP has been pushing this the most. Party officials have said that the difference between the lowest bid and the actual payment is one of the scams in hundreds of crores of rupees that the Delhi BJP has claimed is part of the public money that was misappropriated during the tenure of the previous AAP government, under the guise of cleaning up the environment. Earlier this year, Jain had been questioned by the Enforcement Directorate on the same set of facts and today a chargesheet of the Enforcement Directorate that questioned Jain earlier in the year and which named Rai along with him in a parallel money-laundering case, in which assets valued at Rs 15.36 crore have been attached, was filed against him for a sum exceeding Rs 17.7 crore. That's the financial track, which itself is noteworthy, and the criminal track in Wednesday's case with ACB, which runs parallel to that financial track.

The defence case hinges on the money-laundering case in which Jain was in judicial custody for most of 2022, including October (when the money-laundering tenders were finalised), and it's an argument that is, on its face, hard for anyone to take lightly. Delhi Leader of Opposition Atishi described it as a "political vendetta" against the man who could not have influenced any decision made which he was in jail. Manish Sisodia took it one step further and connected the detention with the Punjab assembly polls which are forthcoming next year, where Jain is the party co-in-charge. The BJP has found it hard to establish a firm foothold in the state, and is turning to central agencies to disrupt the opposition campaign's machinery, Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann said in his reading. It's not a coincidence, as AAP MP Sanjay Singh drew a connection to 2024, when Kejriwal, Sisodia and the latter were arrested ahead of the Delhi elections, as well as the general polls, in that year.

This time, however, the difference is the specificity of Kejriwal's latest allegation. To suggest a minister personally ordered the arrest, as a named minister did, is a serious allegation that may or may not hold water or will prove a costly overreach so far the BJP has not issued any formal rebuttal to the specific allegation, opting to defend the substance of the tender case. Congress was, interestingly, back with the BJP this time as leaders were calling the AAP government "misled" the people of Delhi with regard to a public health and environment project, a rare instance of the two major parties aligning on an AAP issue.

For now let's ignore the politics and just look at the numbers. The gap of around Rs 400 crore between the estimated cost and payment, which is spread across four tenders for infrastructure to clean sewage before it enters into the Yamuna, is no small amount for a city utility which is already operating on soft water tariffs and dealing with a chronic shortage of its revenues. The cash flow of Delhi Jal Board has always been under stress for years and overruns of this magnitude, some of which may be due to true engineering changes, but some others have been attributed to manipulation of tenders, invariably make their mark either in the water bills or in the exchequer of the city. It is the element of this story which gets lost when the arrest turns into a proxy war between the federal government and law enforcement, as India has seen in the Manish Sisodia liquor policy case and in Kejriwal's arrest last year.

Both have been tested solely in court and the venue for this will be court. Since 2022, Jain has been arrested, interrogated and chargesheeted several times, but has never been convicted, a claim that AAP makes regularly and that is true, given the twist the BJP is giving to this case that it is different. Similarly, the amount of money in the DJB tender process is substantial enough that judgements on the ACB's case without testing the evidence is too early.