By Kusumkali Mitra
INTRODUCTION
The Fodder Scam was a corruption scandal that included the misappropriation of about ₹9.4 billion from the government treasury of Bihar. Among those embroiled in the case was the then Chief Minister of Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav as well as previous Chief Minister, Jagannath Mishra. The outrage prompted the end of Lalu’s rule as Chief Minister. Dr. Dineshwar Prasad Sharma is additionally asserted to have gotten ₹300.60 crores from S. N. Sinha. On 23 December, 2017, Lalu Prasad Yadav was sentenced by a CBI special court while Jagannath Misra was acquitted.
The scam supposedly included various Bihar state’s administrative and elected officials over different administrations of the Indian National Congress and the Janata Dal parties. The scam included the manufacture of “vast herds of fictitious livestock” for which feed, medications and animal husbandry equipments were secured. In spite of the fact that the scam broke out in 1996, the theft had been in progress, and expanded in size, for more than two decades.
THE SCAM
The scam originated in small-scale misappropriation by some government officials submitting bogus expense reports, which grew in magnitude and drew extra components, for example, politicians and businesses until an undeniable mafia had formed. Jagannath Mishra, who served his first stretch as the chief minister of Bihar during the 1970s, was the foremost chief minister to be accused of being involved in the scam.
In February 1985, the then Comptroller and Auditor General of India, T. N. Chaturvedi, paid heed to postponed month to month account entries by the Bihar state depository and departments and wrote to the then Bihar Chief Minister, Chandrashekhar Singh, cautioning him that this could be characteristic of impermanent embezzlement. This started a nonstop chain of close investigation and warnings by Principal Accountant Generals (PAGs) and CAGs to the Bihar government across the tenure of numerous chief ministers, yet the warnings were disregarded.
In 1992, Bidhu Bhushan Dvivedi, a police inspector with the state’s anti-corruption unit presented a report sketching out the fodder scam and likely association at the chief ministerial level to the director general of the same vigilance unit, G. Narayan. In supposed response, Dvivedi was moved out of the vigilance unit to a different branch of the administration and afterward suspended from his position. He later became a witness as the corruption cases identifying with the scam went to trial and reinstated by order of the Jharkhand High Court.
INVESTIGATION
In 1990 the executive committee of Bihar Veterinary Association(BVA) was changed and Dr Dinneshwar Prasad Sharma was made the General Secretary of BVA. The mafia took command over the organization. By then, Dr. Dharmendra Sinha and Dr. Biresh Prasad Sinha (the ex-office bearers of BVA) began gathering and assembling data against this entire unscrupulous act of Mafia. They presented this to all the political guns of Bihar. Among all these political weapons was Sushil Kumar Modi who started the entire episode after it was broken out by V S Dubey.
The then alluring yet ‘native’ leader Lalu Prasad Yadav was the Chief Minister of unified Bihar, where the then finance commissioner V S Dubey discovered the monetary abnormalities of a monstrous scope. On 19 January 1996, State Finance Secretary V S Dubey ordered district magistrates and deputy commissioners of all regions to go into instances of unreasonable withdrawals. He followed it up on 20 January 1996 by despatching one of his additional secretaries to make an enquiry of the inordinate drones of cash by Animal Husbandry division from Ranchi depository.
The enquiry uncovered a large scale plunder of government cash; drawn falsely by forged records. The documents his group seized and opened up to the world about, indisputably showed huge misappropriation by a mafia group consisting of officials and businessmen. Ravi S Jha, an Associate Director of Public Affairs, is as of now working with against anti-corruption crusader and great administration advertiser Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament. Lalu ordered the constitution of a commission to investigate the abnormalities. There were fears that state police, which is answerable to the state machinery and the committee would not investigate the case properly and demands were raised to move the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is under central government. Claims were additionally made that few of the individuals of the committee were themselves complicit in the trick. A public interest litigation was filed with the Supreme Court of India, which led to the court’s involvement and based on the ultimate directions issued by the supreme court, on March 1996, the Patna High Court ordered that the case be handed over to the CBI.
PAVING WAY TO PROSECUTION
An inquiry by the CBI started and within days, the CBI filed a submission to the High Court that Bihar authorities and administrators were blocking access to reports that could uncover the presence of a politician-official-business mafia nexus at work. Some legislators of the Bihar Legislative Council responded by claiming the court had been misinformed by the CBI and initiating a privilege motion to discuss possible action against senior figures in the regional headquarters of the CBI, which could proceed similar to a contempt of court proceeding and result in stalling the investigation or even prosecution of the named CBI officials. However, U. N. Biswas, the regional CBI director, and the other officials tendered an unqualified apology to the Legislative Council, the privilege motion was dropped, and the CBI probe continued.[ As the investigation proceeded, the CBI unearthed linkages to the serving chief minister of Bihar, Laloo Prasad Yadav and, on 10 May 1997, made a formal request to the federally-appointed Governor of Bihar to prosecute Laloo. On the same day, a businessman, Harish Khandelwal, who was one of the accused was found dead on train tracks with a note that stated that he was being coerced by the CBI to turn witness for the prosecution. The CBI rejected the charge and its local director, U. N. Biswas, kept the appeal to the governor in place. An Income Tax Investigation also blamed Laloo for the scam. On 8 May 2017, in a major setback for RJD leader Lalu Prasad Yadav, the Supreme Court has ordered separate trials in all four cases registered against him in the Rs. 1000 crore fodder scam. The SC was hearing a CBI plea challenging the Jharkhand High Court’s dropping of conspiracy charges against him. The SC asked the trial court to complete the trial in 9 months.
PROSECUTION
As the CBI found additional proof over the next years, it filed other cases identified with fraud and criminal conspiracy based on specific criminal acts of unlawful withdrawals from the Bihar treasury. Most new cases filed after the division of Bihar state (into the new Bihar and Jharkhand states) in November 2000 were filed in the new Jharkhand High Court situated in Ranchi and a few cases, recorded in the Patna High Court in Patna were additionally moved to Ranchi. Of the 63 cases that the agency had filed by May 2007, the larger part were being prosecuted in the Jharkhand High Court.
Laloo’s initial chargesheet, filed by the CBI was against case identifying with fraudulent withdrawals of ₹370 million (US$5.2 million) from the Chaibasa treasury of the (at that point) Bihar government and was based on enactments including Indian Penal Code sections 420 (cheating) and 120(B) (criminal conspiracy), just as section 13(2) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.
Even though he had been jailed, he was kept in relative comfort at the Bihar Military Police guest house. Following 135 days in judicial custody, Lalu was released on bail. The following year, he was rearrested on a different conspiracy case identifying with the fodder scam. Subsequent to being conceded bail, he was rearrested once more in a disproportionate assets case. His wife and later Chief Minister Rabri Devi was additionally approached to surrender, however then promptly allowed bail. This stretch in jail kept going 11 days for Lalu, followed by one day’s detainment in another fodder scam case.
Jagannath Mishra had been allowed bail in June 1997 and maintained a strategic distance from judicial remand when Lalu was first kept in July 1997. Be that as it may, he was arrested on 16 September of the very year and then released again on bail.
Because of the assortment of cases, Lalu Yadav, Jagannath Mishra, and the other accused have been remanded a few times in the years since 2000. As of May 2007, around 200 individuals had been punished with prison terms of somewhere in the range of 2 and 7 years.
On 1 March 2012, about 16 years after CBI had taken care of the case, a special CBI court in Patna framed charges against Lalu Prasad Yadav and Jagannath Mishra alongside 32 other accused. Of all the 44 accused, six have died, two have turned approvers, while two others are as yet evading arrest.
CONVICTION
As of May 2013, the trial has finished in 44 cases out of an aggregate of 53 cases. More than 500 accused have been sentenced and awarded punishments by different courts. The absolute most conspicuous convicts include former CM of Bihar Lalu Prasad, former Member of Parliament Rabindra Kumar Rana and former Member of Legislative Assembly Dhruv Bhagat.
On 30 September 2013, a Special CBI Court in Ranchi indicted Lalu Prasad Yadav and Jagannath Mishra alongside 44 others in the case. 37 individuals were taken into judicial custody. The court has declared a sentence of five years and four years for Laloo and Jagannath Mishra respectively.
SENTENCES
Former Bihar Chief Minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad was sentenced to five years in prison in a fodder scam case by a CBI special court on 3 October 2013. The court of Pravas Kumar Singh declared the quantum of punishment by means of video conferencing because of security reasons. Prasad has likewise been hit with a fine of Rs 2.5 million. The 65-year-old leader has lost his Lok Sabha seat and is additionally banished from contesting election for a long time following the sentencing because of a prior Supreme Court order.
Another former Bihar Chief Minister, Jagannath Mishra, has been given a 4-year sentence.
CONCLUSION
Since it broke into public light, the fodder scam has become a symbol of bureaucratic corruption and the criminalisation of politics in India and in Bihar specifically. It has been known as a manifestation of a “deep and chronic malady afflicting the Bihar government and quite a few other state governments as well.” In the Indian parliament, it was referred to as a significant pointer of the profound advances made by Mafia Raj in the political and financial issues of the nation. Reference has additionally been made to the anarchic idea of governance (the “withering away of the state”) that happens when a mafia develops in a state-controlled sector of the economy.
The investigation and prosecution in the Fodder Scam is supposed to be guided by the political consideration and motive. For making a strong against case against the politicians and the bureaucrats, CBI launched the prosecution against majority of the officials including lower level staffs, which did not have any nexus with the scam. Numerous employees of the department were suspended and sentenced by the Courts, against whom there were proofs of direct association in the scam. The rationale given in the judgment for such penalty was their designation in the offices from where the scams were undertaken, with no direct contribution in the scam. Because of this the families of numerous employees were left with no alternative for earning. The trial which was begun in 1996 is still underway and the destiny of numerous innocent individuals has been hanging without an assurance.
Lalu Prasad Yadav is the only individual on whom the Lok Sabha debated for the whole session as the official agenda. As of now, Lalu Prasad Yadav has been granted a three-and-a-half-year prison term and a five-lakh fine by the CBI court on 6 January 2018.
On 24 January 2018 the court sentenced for the third case and has granted a five-year prison term and levied a fine of ₹10,00,000 on Lalu Prasad Yadav. The complete prison term in the three judgment sentences add up to 13½ years.