On Wednesday, 24th August 2022, Bihar’s deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav alleged that he was targetted by the central government using various agencies even at the time of his honeymoon. Tejashwi Yadav said that when he was on honeymoon, a lookout notice was put up for him. He also said that when Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya left the country after executing a big scam, there was no lookout notice for them.
Tejashwi Yadav was addressing the Bihar assembly house on the occasion of the confidence vote of the newly-formed RJD-JDU government led by chief minister Nitish Kumar in which the young RJD leader became the deputy chief minister. The RJD-JDU alliance won the confidence vote by voice voting. BJP MLAs walked out of the house during this voting.
Attacking the BJP accusing the party of misusing central investigation agencies against the opposition, Tejashwi Yadav said, “When we went on a honeymoon abroad, there was a lookout notice against us. But there was no lookout notice on Lalit Modi, Nirav Modi, or Vijay Mallya when they escaped executing a fraud of lakhs of crores. Do you mean to say that Tejashwi Yadav is the only thief and dishonest in the country?”
He further said, “Everyone knows that I, my family, my father, my brother, my sister got the punishment for creating equality, brotherhood, harmony in the society. But you should try to understand one thing, we are socialists. We are part of and lineage of socialist politics. We are not cowards. People sitting in Delhi do not understand Bihar. Bihari is not going to be scared.”
Tejashwi Yadav also spoke on the CBI raid at the under-construction Urban Cubes Mall in Gurugram’s Sector 71. According to reports, this mall belongs to Tejashwi Yadav, but he refuted it saying he does not own it. He said, “Raid a lot, don’t move from the mall. Unfortunately, this is how the country’s largest investigating agency is investigating. The mall does not belong to me. But they are unnecessarily naming me in this case. The name of the mall is Urban Cubes. On getting the details, it was found that the director of this company is Krishna Kumar. He hails from Bhiwani, Haryana. We have come to the assembly with the entire company’s documents. This mall has been inaugurated by a BJP MP.”
The investigative agency is conducting raids at various sites related to the RJD leader as it is probing an alleged scam that dates back to Lalu Yadav’s time as the UPA-I government’s minister of railways. On May 18, 2022, CBI filed a case against Lalu Prasad Yadav, his wife Rabri Devi, and his daughters Misa Bharti and Hema Yadav. The CBI also named 12 others in this case who were given jobs in the railway zones of Mumbai, Jabalpur, Kolkata, Jaipur, and Hajipur.
Lalu Prasad’s family paid the sellers in cash for lands measuring 1,05,292 square feet in Patna. These lands allegedly belong to job seekers’ families and were transferred or purchased in exchange for group-D jobs on the railways. According to the FIR, the people were appointed based on forged documents without any advertisement or public notice. Tejashwi Yadav denied these allegations in his today’s speech in the state assembly.
