A law minister slapped with charges of cheating is embarrassing and then being detained under additional charges is denouement. Delhi law minister Jitendra Singh Tomar has been arrested by the Delhi police on Tuesday. Tomar is accused of cheating, forgery and getting jobs on fake degree, and he has been taken to Hauz Khas police station in south Delhi.

Tomar is detained under IPC Section 420, 467, 468, 471 and 120(B).

Commenting on Tomar's arrest, Jarnail Singh, MLA Rajouri Garden in west Delhi, accused the central government of indulging in vindictive politics. Speaking with Governance Now he said the central government wants to paralyse Delhi government through various agencies like Delhi police and LG. “When the case was in high court and he has submitted the required documents what was the urgency to take this step.”

Read more: Fake degree case: Cops pick up Delhi’s law minister

Singh added that chief minister Arvind Kejriwal is holding an emergency meeting at secretariat to decide further course of action and the government will take appropriate steps.

Speaking with NDTV, supreme court advocate KTS Tulsi questioned the intention of the central government behind this step. He said when two cases are pending in high court what was the urgency to register an FIR and arrest the minister without even taking the permission of the speaker. “He is a minister and he is not running away. The case is pending under high court.”

Tomar, a first-time minister, has been surrounded with the controversy over his law degree ever since he took charge as Delhi's law minister. He has been facing charges that academic certificate he submitted while filing nomination for the Delhi assembly election held in February this year was fake.

The bar council of Delhi, earlier, had taken a "prima facie" view that Tomar sought enrollment as a lawyer on basis of forged documents. Congress and BJP have been putting pressure on Kejriwal  and demanded Tomar's dismissal after a Bihar-based university told Delhi high court that they had no record of his law degree.

In the previous AAP government as well the law minister was caught up in the controversy of ordering a midnight raid on a residence in the city's Khirki Extension neighborhood, where hundreds of Africans, mostly from Nigeria and Uganda, are settled. The then Delhi law minister Somnath Bharti had claimed that the house operated as a brothel and he had called for the arrest of some of the women who lived or worked there.