The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday night arrested a nephew of Punjab chief minister and Congress leader Charanjit Singh Channi in connection with a money-laundering case linked to illegal sand mining.

The arrest took place a fortnight before the Assembly polls in Punjab, scheduled for February 20.

The Congress accused the Narendra Modi government of misusing the central agencies in the election-bound state.

Opposition parties have long accused the Centre of letting loose investigating agencies on their leaders to intimidate or malign them.

Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said on Friday: “The agencies are being misused and the government is using them to threaten people, to put pressure on Opposition leaders. This should not be allowed during polls.”

The ED had last month carried out searches on the premises of Bhupinder Singh, a relative of Channi.

Channi had then described the swoop as a “pressure tactic” to settle political scores for “what happened a few days ago in Punjab”.

He was referring to the face-off between the state government and the Centre over the alleged security breach during Prime Minister Modi’s January 5 visit to Ferozepur.

Channi had also pointed to the action by probe agencies against relatives of Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee during last year’s Assembly elections.

Channi had accused the Modi government of using the ED, the income-tax department and other agencies to implicate him.

Sources in the ED said Bhupinder Singh was arrested late on Thursday night under provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act after several hours of questioning at the agency’s office in Jalandhar.

The ED is probing the money-laundering case based on an FIR registered in 2018 by Punjab police against the main accused, Kudrat Deep Singh, who owns quarries. He had allegedly floated several companies to get sand mining contracts, and Bhupinder Singh was the director of one of the companies.

Twenty-six people have been accused in the sand-mining money-laundering case, most of them truck drivers, the ED official said. After the police filed the FIR, the ED had taken over the probe.

The police had intercepted 30 trucks filled with sand, most of it from an area not marked for mining.