Aam Aadmi Party supremo Arvind Kejriwal said on Sunday that he will resign as Delhi Chief Minister (CM) in two days and will return only if the people of the Capital city voted him back to power.
Kejriwal, who stepped out of Tihar Jail on Friday, September 13, after the Supreme Court ordered his release on bail in connection with a now-scrapped liquor policy case, addressed party workers to make the surprise announcement.
A cabinet meet will be held in two days to pick a new Chief Minister, Kejriwal said.
"I will resign as Chief Minister after two days. I will not sit on that chair till the people announce their verdict. Elections in Delhi are months away. I got justice from the legal court, now I will get justice from the people's court. I will sit on the Chief Minister's chair only after the order of the people," he said.
Thanking God for his release and the "lakhs" who prayed for him and other AAP leaders Manish Sisodia and Sanjay Singh, Kejriwal said he had spent a lot of time in jail reading books, the Gita, Ramayana, Mahabharata as well as the works of freedom fighters.
Claiming he was a "revolutionary CM," who went to jail 75 years after independence was achieved after Bhagat Singhs martyrdom, Kejriwal referred to letters written by Bhagat Singh from prison.
The British rulers had made sure Bhagat Singh's letters reached his friends, including Batukeshwar Dutt and others, but a letter that he, Kejriwal, wrote to the LG, urging him to allow AAP leader Atishi hoist the National flag on August 15 in his place as he was in prison did not reach its destination and was returned to him.
"Instead, I was warned that if I wrote again I would not be allowed to meet my family. Even the British had not thought that in independent India there would be a bigger dictator that than the British in this country," he said, hitting out at the BJP-led government at the Centre.
Kejriwal said it was because of his honesty that the people had elected him the Chief Minister, but the mega campaign run by the BJP to prove he was corrupt has failed.
For the first time ever a leader had declared that he will leave it to the people to vote him to power if he is honest and not do so if they thought otherwise, Kejriwal declared.
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