Bhubaneswar: The special court( vigilance) has accepted the closure report in the horse-trading case, pertaining to Rajya Sabha elections in 2016, giving a clean chit to Odisha governor Raghubar Das.
The case was registered in March 2018 at Jagannathpur police station based on a complaint filed by the Additional Secretary of the Home Department. Ajay Kumar, who was then chief minister Rahubar Das’ political advisor, and the director general of the CID, Anurag Gupta, were made accused for allegedly coercing Barkagaon Congress MLA Nirmala Devi to abstain from voting in Rajya Sabha polls. The name of Das, was included later.
THE CASE
Jharkhand state unit chief of the BJP Babulal Marandi, who was then president of Jharkhand Vikas Morcha, filed a complaint before the Election Commission of India (ECI), annexing with it a compact disc (CD) containing purported telephonic conversations between Gupta, Kumar and Nirmala Devi’s husband a and former Congress minister Yogendra Sao. They allegedly offered Rs 5 crore to Sao and assured him to withdraw several criminal cases pending against him.
The next day, the BJP candidates Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Mahesh Poddar made it to the upper house on two vacant seats from Jharkhand, while the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha’s Basant Shoren lost.
The election of BJP’s second candidate, Poddar, came as a surprise, as the party didn’t have sufficient number of votes.
The FSL report, however, said the compact disc of the voice recording of the accused persons, which was submitted to IO, was tampered with. The Ranchi police submitted a closure report in January this year, exonerating Das, Kumar and Gupta with no concrete evidence against them
Das was appointed the 26th Governor of Odisha on October 18, 2023.