New Delhi:
The Delhi Police is nervous about arresting politician Amar Singh even though its chargesheet against him establishes that he designed what's known as the cash-for-votes scam. Mr Singh is currently a Rajya Sabha MP.
The Supreme Court has now given the Delhi Police four more weeks for investigations in the cash for votes scam. The court told investigators to "find the source of the money" which will be "clinching" evidence.
On July 22, 2008, three BJP MPs walked into the Lok Sabha waving bundles of notes, hours before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faced a trust vote. The MPs said they had been given a crore as advance by Amar Singh's aides to abstain during the vote, which would help the UPA government. The 3 MPs - Ashok Argal, Faggan Singh Kulaste and Mahaveer Bhagora - claim they had been promised nine crores. At the time, Mr Singh was with the Samajwadi Party, which provided external support to the UPA.
The Delhi Police's investigation claims to have found enough evidence to pin Mr Singh down. Cellphone records show Sanjeev Saxena, his associate, made several calls to Mr Singh's residence in the hours before the trust vote. The money - a crore - that was paid as an advance to the BJP MPs was delivered in a jeep registered with one of Mr Singh's companies. Mr Singh's denial that Mr Saxena worked closely with him has been over-ridden - the police has enough material including notes written by Mr Singh on his official letter-head that declare Mr Saxena to be his aide.
Mr Saxena was arrested in July this year. So was Sohail Hindustani, who claims to have been a member of the BJP's youth wing and says he worked as a middleman between the BJP MPs and those attempting to buy them. The police presented its chargesheet to the Supreme Court last month. So it's unclear why Mr Singh has not been arrested. Sources say given Mr Singh's stature as a political heavyweight, the police wants to ensure that it has carefully cross-checked its allegations against him. The police would also prefer for the Supreme Court, which is monitoring the investigation, to order Mr Singh's arrest.
The chargesheet also says that Sonia Gandhi's political aide, Ahmed Patel, was questioned by the Delhi Police on July 28 this year at his residence. Mr Patel denied the claims by the three BJP MPs that they had spoken to him on the phone ahead of the trust vote in 2008. Mr Patel also said he had no link to the conspiracy. The Delhi Police also gave him a clean chit saying charges against him had proven baseless.
Another senior politician questioned was the BJP's Arun Jaitley. The Delhi Police met with Mr Jaitley on July 28 at his home. He allegedly told them that in July 2008, he had been warned that three of his party's MPs seemed vulnerable to horse-trading during the trust vote. Mr Jaitley said the person who alerted him to this was Sudheendra Kulkarni, who was then an advisor to senior BJP leader LK Advani. Mr Jaitley shared the possibility of MPs being bought for the vote with the owner of a private TV channel which was later co-opted, allegedly by Mr Kulkarni, to film on hidden camera the money being offered to the MPs by Mr Singh's associates.
Mr Kulkarni has been accused by the Delhi Police of engineering the scheme - he wanted to prove that the UPA was willing to bribe MPs to support it during the trust vote, so he urged the three MPs to put themselves on the market, and then enlisted a TV channel to conduct a sting.