Ground reality of Lalu's land deals

Once bitten, twice shy. This age-old saying is not applicable to an ‘intrepid’ politician like Lalu Prasad, who, of late has been receiving bad press owing to his alleged land deals in the last decade.

The man, who has gone to jail six times on the charge of being involved in the multi-crore fodder scam in Bihar and has fought a long-drawn legal battle in disproportionate assets case, appears to have not learnt one bit of a lesson from his past misdeeds.

The multiple raids and search operations being carried out by the income tax sleuths at his Delhi residence as well as his aides’ farm house could, if the charges are found to be true, spell more trouble for the leader who is already convicted in animal husbandry scam and debarred from contesting elections.

Lalu’s alleged land deals involving his wife Rabri Devi (former chief minister), two ministerial sons Tej Pratap and Tejaswi Yadav and daughter Misa Bharti (a Rajya Sabha member) would have remained under wraps had not senior BJP leader and former deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi spilled the beans about the shady transactions. Incidentally, it was Sushil Modi who was a petitioner in the fodder scam in mid-90s, which led to Lalu’s incarceration and downfall.

This time too, Modi, backed by concrete documentary evidence, has been firing on all cylinders. It all started on April 5 this year when Modi charged that Lalu influenced a Patna Zoo soil deal, worth Rs 90 lakh.

As per the allegation, the soil was lifted from the biggest upcoming shopping mall, which was reportedly owned by Lalu’s family. The soil was lifted for construction of a pathway at zoo without floating a tender. This happened, Modi said, because Lalu’s elder son Tej Pratap was Bihar’s forest and environment minister.

Producing substantial evidence, Modi said the land for shopping mall was transferred by industrialists Harsh and Vinay Kochar to Delight Marketing Pvt Ltd, owned by RJD Rajya Sabha MP Prem Gupta, a Lalu confidant, in 2005.

This ‘deal’ was done after the Kochar brothers were awarded two hotels belonging to the Railways in Ranchi (Jharkhand) and Puri (Odisha) when Lalu was the railway minister (from 2004 to 2009). Eventually, Delight Marketing Pvt Ltd was transferred to Lalu’s family along with the assets in 2014 and renamed as LaRa Projects (an acronym for Lalu and Rabri) in 2016.

The BJP leader further said the two traders O P Katyal and Amit Katyal transferred the entire shares of their company A K Infosystems Pvt Ltd to Rabri Devi and Deputy Chief Minister Tejaswi Yadav. The Katyal brothers had set up a liquor factory at Bihta,near Patna, when Rabri Devi was Bihar chief minister. The factory was eventually closed down.

Front company
In yet another allegation, Modi charged Lalu with using Mumbai-based A B Exports Pvt Ltd as a ‘front company’ to acquire a prime residential property worth Rs 115 crore in New Delhi’s New Friends Colony, which also shared the address with many companies owned by Prem Gupta.

On April 27, Modi said that former Union ministers Kanti Singh and Raghunath Jha had transferred their immoveable properties worth crores in the name of Rabri and her kin.

This, he said was done in lieu of Kanti and Jha being made Union ministers (from RJD quota) in the UPA-I regime. Lalu, who was then the railway minister, had recommended their names. The two former ministers, however, had no qualms in admitting that they transferred their properties to Lalu’s family so as to strengthen the hands of the RJD chief.

Meanwhile, the latest shady dealings have been reportedly unearthed by an Enforcement Directorate probe into Mishail Packers and Printers Pvt Ltd, a company ostensibly named after Lalu’s daughter Misa and her husband Shailesh.

Though Lalu maintained no such company existed, he challenged the ‘BJP-backed media’ to tell the nation “where are the 22 places where the income tax sleuths were reported to have carried out raids and search operations.”

“This vendetta exercise is meant to malign the image of my family and demoralise me, so that I play no role in bringing all the non-BJP parties under one umbrella. But my rally in Patna on August 27 will prove all the sceptics wrong. The more the BJP attacks me, the stronger I will emerge,” averred Lalu, undeterred by the income tax raids which were limited to Delhi and nearby areas, not Bihar.