There appears to be trouble ahead for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and former minister Eknath Khadse after a court allowed an intervention application challenging the clean chit given by the State anti-corruption bureau (ACB) to him in an alleged land grabbing case.
Judge S.R. Navandar allowed the application filed by anti-corruption activist Anjali Damania in May last year against the clean chit to Mr. Khadse concerning a prime plot belonging to the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) at Bhosari that he had allegedly acquired by illicit means by abusing his position as revenue minister.
Last year, in its final submission to a Pune court, the ACB had said that it failed to find “definite proof” that Mr. Khadse had misused his office to seize a three-acre plot in the possession of the MIDC for his private use near Pimpri-Chinchwad.
“The intervention application was allowed after follow-up of more than one-and-a-half years … We submitted before the court that we are not any ‘third party’ but the original complainant. We have also submitted, along with an affidavit, documents by which we can prove how Mr. Khadse came to acquire the land through illegal means by abusing his position,” advocate Asim Sarode, who filed the petition, said.
Mr. Sarode said the court’s decision has raised hopes of ordinary citizens who can now take to task politicians like Ajit Pawar, Subhash Deshmukh and Pankaja Munde who have been under the scanner for corruption in multi-crore cases but are off the leash after being given ‘clean chit’ in dubious circumstances.
The court has posted the date for the next hearing on January 9, 2020.
Ms. Damania had been nudging the ACB to probe Mr. Khadse since 2017, after having submitted documents allegedly containing proof of the BJP leader’s illicit transactions in securing the plot.
In May 2016, city-based whistleblower Hemant Gawande had filed a complaint against Mr. Khadse in Pune, which, among other factors, eventually led to the latter’s resignation from the State Cabinet.
In April 2017, the ACB had finally registered an FIR against Mr. Khadse in compliance with the Bombay High Court’s directive based on Mr. Gawande’s complaint. The FIR was under Sections 13 (1) d, 13 (2) and 15 of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, and Section 109 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) against the minister, his wife, Mandakini, son-in-law Girish Chaudhari, and Abbas Rasool Ukani, the original owner of the plot said to be in cahoots with Mr. Khadse in allegedly engineering the scam.
According to Mr. Gawande, the original valuation of the plot, according to the sub-registrar, stood at ₹31 crore, a far cry from Mr. Khadse’s figure of ₹3.75 crore. Mr. Gawande had alleged that the value of the property when Mr. Khadse’s kin applied for compensation would stand at ₹65 crore, twice the original market valuation (calculated as per the compensation under the new land acquisition policy of 2013).
