Mani Kumar Subba, a controversial former MP from Assam whose allegedly doubtful citizenship was probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation passed away in Delhi on Sunday night after a prolonged battle with illness.
Going by the age mentioned in the affidavit he filed for contesting the Tezpur Lok Sabha seat in 2014, he was 61.
Mr Subba was the wealthiest MP from the northeast before perfume baron Badruddin Ajmal of the All India United Democratic Front was elected to the Parliament from Assam in 2006. But he was in the news more for the controversial lotteries his firm MS Associates ran in several states and a row over his citizenship.
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Mr. Subba claimed to have been born in March 1958 in West Bengal’s Darjeeling. This claim was challenged by Ashok Kumar Subba, a leader of the erstwhile Janata Party who lodged a complaint saying that the former MP was a foreign national born in Taplejung district of Nepal.
CBI probe
Former Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta took up Mr. Subba’s citizenship issue with the Centre. G.K. Pillai, then the Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs, asked the CBI in December 1997 to inquire into the allegations that Mr Subba, then an MLA from the Naoboisa constituency was a foreigner.
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The CBI registered a case against him in January 1998, a few months before he won the Lok Sabha election from the Tezpur constituency on a Congress ticket.
In its charge sheet filed in the court of the special judicial magistrate, Assam, in January 2011, the CBI said Mr Subba was a Nepali national and his actual name was Mani Raj Limbu. The investigating agency also accused him of obtaining a passport based on forged documents.
The Nepal government, replying to the court’s letter a year later, said Mr Subba was not a citizen of Nepal and that one Mani Raj Limbu was convicted for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment but was released from jail in 1982.
Lottery scam
Mr Subba’s opponents say that in 1962 he came from Nepal to Sikkim, then an independent country, where he worked as a plantation labourer. His supporters say he did work as a farm hand in East Sikkim, but went there from Darjeeling.
In 1965, he migrated to Tinsukia in Upper Assam where he reportedly set up a gambling business. A few years later he went to Arunachal Pradesh and married a relative of the Frontier State’s former Chief Minister Gegong Apang.
This link soon made him one of the biggest contractors in Arunachal Pradesh. His political graph climbed when in 1991 former Assam Chief Minister Hiteswar Saikia offered him a Congress ticket for the Naoboisa Assembly constituency.
But trouble caught up with Mr Subba when his firm defaulted in payments to the Sikkim, Manipur and Nagaland governments while running lotteries on their behalf. His firm came under the scanner after the Comptroller and Auditor General detected a massive scam in the conduct of the Nagaland State Lottery in 1999.
The Nagaland government, the CAG discovered, earned only a minuscule revenue from the lottery that ran for four years. While 91% of the face value of tickets was to be paid as prize money, only 78% was actually given away. The scam worked out to more than Rs 400 crore, the CAG report said.
‘ Gandhiji’s blessings’
The scams did not affect Mr Subba’s influence on the Congress in Assam. The party kept fielding him from the Tezpur Lok Sabha constituency.
Mr Subba’s would attribute his victory to “Gandhiji’s blessings” and would often assert this while pointing to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s profile on a currency note while addressing public rallies. His graph nosedived after he lost the 2009 election to Asom Gana Parishad’s Joseph Toppo.
He contested the seat in 2014 as an independent when the Congress denied him a ticket. He finished third behind the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Ram Prasad Sarmah, an advocate who pursued the citizenship case against him, and Bhupen Kumar Borah of the Congress.
Mr Subba took ill while campaigning that year and was suffering from heart ailment since. “ Bhagwan unki atma ko shanti de (may his soul rest in peace),” Mr Sarmah, who was denied a ticked by the BJP this time, said.