Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday announced he would go with elected representatives of his Aam Aadmi Party to the BJP central office and ask the party to have anyone it wanted arrested.

The chief minister’s webcast came minutes after authorities told a Delhi court that Kejriwal’s aide Bibhav Kumar had been arrested for allegedly assaulting party MP Swati Maliwal on Monday.

Kejriwal said: “On Sunday at 12 noon, I am coming to BJP headquarters with all the big leaders including my MPs, MLAs…. They sent me, Manish Sisodia, Satyendar Jain, Sanjay Singh to jail and now they have put my PA in jail.”

He added: “Put us in jail together. You think that if you crush AAP by putting our leaders in jail, then the Aam Aadmi Party will end…. If you put AAP leaders in jail, this country will produce a hundred times as many leaders.”

Maliwal has alleged that Kumar brutally assaulted her and attempted to disrobe her at the chief minister’s Flagstaff Road bungalow on Monday. The AAP initially came out in her support, but on Friday denounced her publicly as the “face” of a “BJP conspiracy”, a day after she filed a police complaint.

Her medical report says she has “bruises over proximal left leg dorsal aspect of approx size 3x2 cm and right cheek elbow below right eye of approx size 2x2 cm”.

Police picked up Kumar from the chief minister’s home on Saturday and told reporters they had questioned several people present on the premises during Monday’s incident.

After an anticipatory bail hearing at the Tis Hazari courts in the evening, Kumar’s counsel N. Hariharan told reporters: “I have made a pitch for anticipatory bail because what is seen in the CCTV footage and coverage is not borne out by the statement, which is belated for a period of three days.”

The BJP has accused the AAP of misogyny. On Friday, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman underlined that the INDIA bloc hadn’t fielded any women from the capital’s seven Lok Sabha seats while the BJP had nominated two.

She specifically named the AAP’s New Delhi candidate, Somnath Bharti, who was once arrested for allegedly assaulting his pregnant wife Lipika, who withdrew her complaint in 2019 after reuniting with her husband.

On Saturday, the couple appeared together in a webcast, where Lipika asked women BJP leaders not to make personal attacks for political mileage in the context of a marital dispute that had been resolved.

“Help the women who need you like the women of Manipur… the wrestlers who pleaded for your help… the victims of Karnataka. You are powerful and can help them,” she said.