BHOPAL: A special court at Bhind district in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh ordered including the name of minister of state for general administration Lal Singh Arya in the 2009 Congress MLA Makhanlal Yadav murder case.
The court of special judge (SC/ST Atrocities) Yogesh Kumar Gupta also issued a non-bailable arrest warrant (NBW) against the minister. The execution of the NBW, however, was stayed by the same court following submissions and arguments by Arya’s counsel in the case.
The Opposition leaders — Congress state president Arun Yadav and state Aam Aadmi Party convener Alok Agrawal — demanded that on moral grounds, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan should sack Lal Singh Arya from the council of ministers as by remaining a minister, Arya might influence the trial.
The slain Congress MLA Makhanlal Jatav’s son, Ranveer Yadav, who had won the assembly bypoll from Gohad (Bhind) as Congress candidate after his father’s murder in 2009, also demanded that Arya be dropped from the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government.
Arya told journalists in Bhopal that CBI had given him a clean chit. “My counsel applied for staying the warrant execution which the court has permitted. Since I haven’t received any summon or notice from the court till now, I don’t think it’s appropriate to speak more,” said Arya.
Ram Pratap Singh Kushwah, the counsel for the family of the slain Congress MLA, said, “We had moved three applications before the court under different Sections for ordering the police to place before court the written statements of three eye witnesses of the April 2009 murder and include the minister Lal Singh Arya’s name among the accused.”
In their statements before the court, the three eye witnesses to the murder, including Banwari Lal, Shripal and the slain MLA’s son Arvind Jatav, had said that the then Gohad (Bhind) MLA Makhanlal Jatav sat in a jeep after a Lok Sabha election meeting in Charheta village of Bhind district. Just when Jatav sat in the jeep with three others, including son Arvind, BJP leader Lal Singh Arya asked men wielding guns to shoot Jatav. The gun wielding men opened fire on Jatav, leading to his death, the eye witnesses stated before the police.