Asia Times: Court orders custody for political leader


	April 7, 2000	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Court orders custody for political leader
By Ranjit Dev Raj

NEW DELHI - A special court in Patna, capital of eastern Bihar state, sent to jail on Wednesday, Laloo Prasad Yadav, one of India's most charismatic political leaders and husband of the state's chief minister Rabri Devi.

The Yadav couple have been charged with owning assets disproportionate to their declared income by a special court of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). But Rabri Devi was granted bail according to reports by the United News of India (UNI) news agency. Her chargesheeting creates the piquant situation of a serving chief minister having to attend court on charges pertaining to tax evasion.

According to the CBI chargesheet, filed Tuesday, the couple had unaccountable assets worth $100,000 - a sum of money considered paltry given the huge fortunes many Indian politicians are known to have amassed. Yadav, interviewed in jail by UNI, said his house was overvalued to implicate him after the CBI failed to turn up hard evidence against him or the chief minister.

He accused the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and its allies in the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) of using the CBI to carry on a political vendetta against his popular, regional Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) party.

Following an inconclusive verdict in elections to the Bihar state assembly, last month, the NDA failed to gather support to sustain a government and was forced to make way for Rabri Devi to return as chief minister heading an RJD-led coalition government.

Yadav has maintained throughout that the cases against him, five in all, were part of attempts by the BJP to discredit him and the RJD. The fact that the CBI initiated proceedings in the court on the same day that Rabri Devi was sworn in as chief minister for a second term seemed to lend credence to Yadav's charges of a political vendetta. Devi, a illiterate housewife who never attended school, became chief minister in 1997 when her husband was forced to step down after proceedings were launched against him for involvement in the embezzlement of $280 million of farm development funds.

Meanwhile, leaders of the NDA, including Nitish Kumar who was Bihar chief minister for 10 days last month but quit without facing a vote of confidence, have been demanding that Rabri Devi resign office on ''moral grounds'' as a chargesheeted person.

But Yadav and his supporters in the Congress party and in the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M) argue that union Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani and union Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi have also been chargesheeted but are still in office. ''You cannot have two yardsticks,'' said Sitaram Yechuri politburo member of the CPI-M which supports the Rabri Devi government from the outside because it wants to oppose the fundamentalism of the BJP.

Advani and Joshi were chargesheeted for their involvement in the 1993 demolition of the Babri Masjid, a 17th century structure which they and other fundamentalists say were built by Muslim invaders over an ancient Hindu temple. The campaign to rebuild the Hindu temple helped the BJP to come to power at the center in 1998 dislodging the avowedly secular Congress party which led India to independence in 1947 and ruled for most of the intervening years.

Yadav told UNI that the BJP was now trying to remove secular leaders from political mainstream and to grab power in Bihar after failing to get a popular mandate.

(Inter Press Service)

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�1999 Asia Times Online Co., Ltd.

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