Slush Track Leads South

Days after the CBI filed its chargesheet in the case, agency officials have stumbled upon several pieces of new evidence. And with this, the emphasis has suddenly shifted from Satish Sharma, Buta Singh, R.K. Dha-wan and Bhajan Lal to K. Veer-appa Moily, two former Karn-ataka ministers Ramalinga Reddy and H.M. Revanna and a couple of powerful liquor barons in Bangalore. But the prize catch of them all was V. Rajeshwara Rao, nephew of former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, whose house in Delhi was raided by the CBI last week. Recovered: some "highly incriminating" documents connecting the Raos to the JMM payoffs and 50 bottles of premium foreign scotch. Rajeshwara Rao has been booked under the Excise Act.

But it is not the Excise Act that should be worrying the former prime minister. On November 14, the CBI startled those present at the Delhi High Court when it stated that the four JMM MPs were paid money at the "express command" of Narasimha Rao. "The offi-cers have cracked the case. They have got to the bottom of the matter," the CBI counsel declared.

The beans were spilled by Shailendra Mahto, one of the JMM former MPs, say CBI sources. During the course of yet another round of interrogation, Mahto said that Rajeshwara Rao was one of the go-bet-weens for his uncle and Satish Sharma in organising the money. During the course of raiding Rajeshwara’s house, the CBI came across his bank passbooks and several documents that suggested his links with key members of his uncle’s party as well as some leaders from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

During the course of interrogation, Rajeshwara Rao is said to have confessed certain details. "He told us that he had been frequently in touch with Satish Sharma, Bhajan Lal and the other main accused in the JMM case. Some more details were also revealed, which we are processing," an official said on condition of anonymity. Since then, V. Rajeshwara Rao has sought anticipatory bail. This will come up for hearing on December 3. The agency has seized his passbooks and other relevant papers.

The agency also claims it has charted out the route of a sizeable chunk of money which was transported to Delhi from Bangalore. The conduit in this case was the treasurer of the Andhra Pradesh Congress and prominent liquor baron from Karnataka, Adikeshvarulu, who has since been detained by the CBI. According to them, one morning in March 1993, Adikesh-varulu was escorted through Bangalore airport with two huge bags full of money. While initially the others with him were identified as Government officials, it now turns out they were Revanna and Reddy, both ministers in Veerappa Moily’s cabinet. Their job was to escort the money to Delhi so that no suspicions were raised at the airport.

Last week, the agency raided Karnataka Bhawan where the two former ministers were staying. But by the time the team reached Karnataka Bhavan, the two had already been tipped off. Later when they were picked up in Bangalore, the former ministers are said to have confessed to having carried the money to Delhi and meeting Rajeshwara Rao and Satish Sharma among others to finalise the deal.

Adikeshvarulu’s own standing reveals the scale of the JMM operation payoff. A Bangalore-based liquor baron in his own right, Adikeshvarulu is reckoned to be on good terms with Vijay Mallya, chairman of the UB group, rated on his own estimate to be worth Rs 300 to 350 crore. Owner of one of the biggest bottling plants in Asia on the outskirts of Hyderabad, Adikesh-varulu came into prominence through Manguta Subbarami Reddy, the Congress MP who was gunned down by naxalites of the Peoples’ War Group last year. Reddy was said to have financed Narasimha Rao’s election from Nandyal. In Andhra, his connections were legendary. And in Bangal-ore, it was no less. He acquired the Apollo hospital from Vijay Mallya.

Just how massive the operation was can be gauged from the fact that a Haryana cadre deputy inspector general of police, supposed to be close to Bhajan Lal, carried out the perfect hatchet job for his bosses. According to CBI sources, when the Jhar-khand MPs were being taken to several guest houses in Haryana, they were "liberally entertained" inside specially-fitted Intelligence Bureau (IB) Ambassadors. The unsuspecting former MPs, not familiar with the ways of the IB, were unaware of the miniature cameras specially fitted inside the car.

All this makes for an interesting video film, which will be part of the exhibit that   the CBI plans to produce before the high court by the end of this month when they are to produce their status report. In addition, the CBI has also questioned the DIG concerned about his role, and this has given leads pointing to other people involved in the operation.

The agency is also in the process of gathering other tidbits that may constitute evidence against the persons it has named in the FIR. It has in its possession a video recording which shows Bhajan Lal boasting at a gathering of the Bish-noi Samaj (the community he belongs to) that it was he who got the vital seven MPs Rao needed to save his government.

Unhappily for the CBI, key witness Shai-lendra Mahto is apparently going way overboard. In a letter to the President Shankar Dayal Sharma from Tihar jail, Mahto has said that not only they (the four JMM MPs), but a total of seven MPs were paid huge sums of money. Naming Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav and Ajit Singh as being "prime beneficiaries", he said that MPs from Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Muslim League and others had either abstained from voting or had kept away from the proceedings very deliberately. Mahto’s contention: even Deve Gowda, then a low-profile back-bencher for the Samajwadi Janata Party (SJP) had not voted, as per the plan.

According to Mahto, just because the money had been found in the bank accounts of the four, a case had been made out. "If there was no money, there would have been no case," Mahto pleads. "Why can’t the defection of seven MPs under Yadav during the no-confidence motion be termed as bribery?" Well-placed sources in the agency say that at least one or even two supplementary charge-sheets will be filed in the JMM case by November-end. In the case of Satish Sharma, at least two more cases related to his petroleum ‘deals’ may be filed in an effort to buttress their chargesheet.

Says Mukesh Bawa, general secretary of the Jharkhand Peoples’ Party: "What the CBI is looking at is only the tip of the iceberg. "Bawa is among those who have been working with his lawyers to look at the missing link in the JMM case: the disappearance of Shashi N. Jha, private secretary of accused former MP Shibhu Soren. Jha, one of the key eyewitnesses to the entire deal, has been missing ever since the CBI started sniffing for clues in south Bihar. It was Jha who reportedly helped break the story of how JMM MPs were bought in a party journal way back in 1993. Now, Bawa claims, Soren’s driver Rajkumar, another crucial witness, is also missing.

Clearly in a case of this magnitude, there are still several missing links. And well-placed sources in the agency say that the issue of linking Narasimha Rao directly to the payoff is a long way off. But then, as developments in the last fortnight or so connecting the JMM payoffs to Karnataka indicate, did the CBI charg-esheet jump the gun?