BHOPAL: Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath termed the recent Income Tax department raids at the premises of his close aides in four states as “politically motivated.”
Responding to queries by journalists in Chhindwara district where he and son Nakul Nath filed nominations as Congress candidates for assembly by-election and Lok Sabha polls respectively on Tuesday, the CM said “since last three days efforts were made to pressurize me. But in my political life till date no one has been able to buckle me down under pressure. All this is nothing, but part of tactics to divert attention from real issues.”
He also claimed that those from whose premises, the unaccounted cash has been seized are actually related to the BJP. “What is happening is tactics of central agencies to put pressure on me, but I’m not going to be unsettled by it,” said Nath.
In Bhopal, meanwhile, former MP CM and Congress candidate from Bhopal Lok Sabha seat Digvijaya Singh lashed out at the Narendra Modi government and the BJP over the way the IT raids were conducted in MP.
“As per the federal structure inherent in the Indian Constitution, any central agencies before carrying out any operation in any state has to inform the concerned state government, which was not done by the IT department sleuths in MP. The IT department sleuths who carried out the operation amid CRPF security in the state without informing state authorities amounts to onslaught on the federal structure of the Constitution. The PM as well as the Finance Minister need to reply on it,” said Singh after the inauguration of his election office in Bhopal.
While maintaining that the man from whose premises the unaccounted cash been seized in Bhopal is a BJP man, Singh said imagine how much money would have been recovered if Mamaji’s premises was raided by the IT department sleuths.
Former Madhya Pradesh CM and BJP national vice president Shivraj Singh Chouhan is popularly addressed in the state as ‘Mamaji.’
Further training guns at the Modi government over the IT raids, Singh said normally the agencies like the Income Tax department, the Central Board for Direct Taxes (CBDT) and Enforcement Directorate (ED) don’t make statements before 90 days from their action. Then why was the official statement issued in 48 hours, questioned Singh.
Stating the crisis was prevalent across the country, the Rajya Sabha MP said N Chandrababu Naidu had been opposing the Centre’s attitude towards Andhra Pradesh, the same was being done by DMK leader MK Stalin in Tamil Nadu, while ministers in Karnataka have been under the I-T department’s lens for a while.
Meanwhile, in a related development, Praveen Kakkar, the ex-cop-turned OSD to the MP CM has filed a petition in the Indore Bench of Madhya Pradesh High Court against the IT department action at premises owned by him and son.
The division bench of the HC will hear the petition on April 11.
Talking to journalists in Indore, Kakkar alleged that the IT searches at his and son’s premises were politically motivated. He also alleged that the IT department sleuths entered his house in Indore at around 3.30 am on Sunday after breaking the doors of the house locked from inside.
Importantly, the pre-dawn searches by IT department sleuths at premises of Kakkar and his close aide Ashwini Sharma in Indore and Bhopal, have detected widespread and well organized racket of collection of unaccounted cash worth around Rs 281 crores through various persons in different walks of life, including business, politics and public service.
According to official statement by CBDT/IT Department on Monday evening, a part of the cash was also transferred to the headquarter of a major political party in Delhi, including about Rs 20 crores, which was moved through hawala recently to the HQ of the political party from the residence of senior functionary at Tughlak Road, New Delhi.
Meticulous record of collection and disbursement of cash in the form of hand written diaries, computer files and excel sheets found and seized, corroborate the above findings. Unaccounted cash totaling Rs 14.6 crores has been found so far, besides 252 bottles of liquor, few arms and tiger skin.