Kishanganj: Parshuram Chauhan from Kishanganj in Bihar who claimed five days ago that he had sold about a quarter of an acre to the state BJP unit for Rs. 70 Lakh has taken a u-turn and blamed the media for misquoting him.
Lashing out at the media, Chauhan said, “The media who came to take my comment behaved like it was a fish market. I only said Rs. 17 lakhs, they heard it as 70 lakhs.” In fact, the sales deeds of the land deal transacted in September show that Chauhan sold two plots of land for Rs. 35 Lakh, one owned by him and another in his wife’s name. Going by Chauhan’s assertion, the remaining Rs. 35 Lakh was received in unaccounted cash.
When asked why he claimed Rs. 17 Lakh when he sold the two plots for Rs. 35 Lakh, he has an even more interesting answer. “I have had a brain haemorrhage. So I sometimes forget things.”
BJP in Bihar has bought several lands and Chauhan’s is one among them for office space. The land deals took place between August and October this year, just months before the Modi-led NDA government’s note ban.
Parties like Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janta Dal United hold it up as proof that the BJP was tipped off about the shock ban on Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes from November 8 – and was hurriedly dumping unaccounted wealth through these land deals. The BJP says it paid the registered value for the land in Kishanganj through bank transfer, but the property document of one of the plots worth Rs. 15 Lakh shows that the amount was paid in “nakad” or cash.
But the BJP unit says, “The unique transaction number was taking time. So the property papers show that it was paid through cash,” claims Dilip Jayaswal, lawmaker and Bihar BJP’s treasurer. The party also added that it had been looking for land for offices for a while and managed to swing a cheap deal only now. “We had been looking since January. We got low rates because the area has a lot of potholes and it is located next to a crematorium,” says Rajeshwar Vaid, a BJP leader in Kishanganj.
Land records suggest that the market value of the land bought by the BJP is double the registered value. “The government rates are very low. As per the market value, that plot of land should be around Rs. 64 Lakh,” said real estate agent Mohd Safi.
