The ghost of the 2008 cash-for-vote scam again came to haunt Amar Singh on Tuesday as the parliamentarian was arrested soon after a Delhi court denied him bail—and sent the Rajya Sabha member to judicial custody in Tihar jail. Piquantly, the Samajwadi Party to which he originally belonged was the only organisation in the country’s political spectrum to say that the 55-year-old leader from Uttar Pradesh was being framed.
“He has been made a scapegoat,” said SP national spokesman and General Secretary Mohan Singh. “This is nothing but a whitewash by the Delhi Police after strictures from the Supreme Court.” The two Singhs were bitter enemies when they were party colleagues.
Amar Singh earned the court’s ire when the MP initially said he was “too ill” to attend the legal proceedings—and then appeared in the court on Tuesday.
The court rejected his bail along with that of former BJP MPs Faggan Singh Kulaste and Mahabir Singh Bhagora, who too appeared before the court responding to its summons for their alleged role in the scam.
BJP veteran L K Advani’s former aide Sudheendra Kulkarni, who has also been chargesheeted in the case, did not appear in the court on Tuesday, as he is stated to be abroad.
Singh, armed with his medical reports, made a fervent plea to the court to grant him bail, saying he had recently undergone a kidney transplant in Singapore that required intensive round-the-clock medical care. “There is infection in my urinary track which is dangerous for my borrowed kidney,” he said.
The judge, after going through the medical reports, said they did not show his medical history of the past one-year period. “What has been your medical history since September-October 2010? Whatever you have given to me is prior to September 2010,” he told Singh. To this, the MP said, “There was little time on Tuesday. So I could not get all the reports.”
Rejecting the bail plea of all the three, the judge said “grounds for interim bail in all three applications are similar as (those) for regular bail and will be considered at an appropriate stage. File reply.” The three will be produced on September 19, the court added.
Earlier, seeking interim bail for Singh, senior advocate Amrendra Sharan and advocate N Hariharan said there was “nothing in this case. “There is high probability that ultimately the accused will not be convicted and they may even be discharged,” Sharan said. “There is no apprehension that Singh will tamper evidence or abscond.”
The cash-for-vote scam involved bribing BJP MPs to cross-vote in favour of the Congress in July 2008 during the Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement. The police report alleges that at Amar Singh's behest, Sanjeev Saxena, supposedly Singh’s secretary, bribed three BJP MPs. Suhail Hindustani, an activist of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, acted as a facilitator during the entire exercise that was videographed clandestinely by a television news channel as part of a “sting operation” allegedly masterminded by Kulkarni.
Shortly after the sting operation was carried out, the BJP MPs had waved wads of currency notes and placed them on the table of the House, leading to much furore. The “bribe money” and recordings were then submitted to the Speaker and a Parliamentary committee that enquired into the scam had recommended a probe.
The probe was conducted by Delhi Police which was slammed by the Supreme Court for its “non-serious approach” to the matter. This is why Samajwadi Party called the arrest a response of the court.
Ironically, the Congress I, the party for which Amar Singh had done all this – so that it should not face the embarrassment of losing the nuclear deal – distanced itself from the arrest. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal rejected the allegations that the UPA Government was the beneficiery of the 2008 ''cash-for-vote'' scam saying it did not need the votes of three BJP MPs who claimed to have been bribed.
