Mumbai: After spending 101 days behind the bars, Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut on Thursday said that he will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah but did not give details.
Terming his stay in the Arthur Road Central Jail as an ordeal, he said he was in solitary confinement, had no contact with the outside world and he used to talk to himself or to the jail walls.
A visibly relaxed Raut also said that he wore a watch for the first time after over three months.
His tenure in the prison cell made him wonder how Savarkar endured 10 years and Lokmanya Tilak spent six years or how Atal Bihari Vajpayee stayed for nearly two years in jail during the Emergency.
“A jail term is not good… I have suffered a lot, my family has also lost much. It is wrong to send anybody to jail for no reasons,” said Raut.
Nevertheless, the MP said he harboured no grudge against the Enforcement Director (ED) or those who hatched the conspiracy to send him to jail.
He reiterated that the government of Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde is “unconstitutional”.
The MP said he will also soon meet his party chief Uddhav Thackeray and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) President Sharad Pawar.
Commenting on the Congress, Raut said if his health permits, he would join Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, currently traversing through Maharashtra.
The firebrand leader said his arrest was illegal and that has been stated by the Special PMLA Court on Wednesday.
The country has never seen this kind of politics, he said. “Our country was under foreign rule for 150 years, but we did not see this kind of political vendetta in the country. Even the enemies were treated nicely.”
“My faith in the judiciary has been enhanced,” said Raut, who was arrested by the ED in a money laundering case.
