“I saw Satyendra Jain giving Rs 2 crore in cash to Arvind Kejriwal with my own eyes. I asked him what it was and Kejriwal said there are some things that happen in politics.”
Arvind Kejriwal and Kapil Mishra. Credit: PTI/Twitter
New Delhi: Former Delhi water minister Kapil Mishra, who was removed from the government on Saturday, on Sunday accused chief minister Arvind Kejriwal of taking Rs 2 crore in cash from another minister, Satyendra Jain, on Friday and charged that the latter had arranged a Rs 50-crore land deal for a relative of the chief minister.
Mishra, who was removed from the Delhi cabinet on May 6 hours after he had shot off a letter to the Anti-Corruption Bureau chief on the water tanker scam and met Kejriwal to discuss the issue of corruption, made these serious allegations outside Raj Ghat, the samadhi of Mahatma Gandhi, from where Kejriwal and others had launched the India Against Corruption campaign.
Mishra said his faith in Kejriwal was shattered on Friday when “I saw Satyendra Jain giving Rs 2 crore in cash to Arvind Kejriwal with my own eyes. I asked him what it was and Kejriwal said there are some things that happen in politics.”
Mishra said when he went to meet Kejriwal again yesterday, he asked, “Why was there so much cash and where did it come from. I thought may be it was a mistake. I told Kejriwal to ask for forgiveness. I told him that as a minister I will have to disclose it. Then there was the meeting of MLAs but Kejriwal remained silent. It is then that I decided to go public.”
“In the issue of money laundering and black money,” Mishra charged, “there are several allegations against Satyendra Jain which everyone knows. How he kept his relatives in government, how he got a Rs 50-crore land deal for a Kejriwal relative. But after seeing this much cash, things have become quite clear.”
Stating that he would not remain silent “even if my life goes”, Mishra, who acted and spoke in the tone and tenor of Kejriwal, said he would stand for truth. “I have been an activist since 2004. I agitated following the Jessica Lal case, the Commonwealth Games corruption case and even wrote a book on it. I was one of ten founder members of IAC and member of AAP from the first day.”
Coming out of Raj Ghat after paying obeisance to Gandhi, Mishra declared that today also he was “launching an andolan (campaign)” by bringing out the truth. “Today also an andolan is starting. I am with AAP and will always remain with it. I will not leave AAP,” he said.
Stating that “in the fight for truth such things always happen,” Mishra said, “I have come to the samadhi of Mahatma Gandhi because one feels energetic here and gains strength. First I want to say that AAP is our party, my party, we agitated for it, got beaten with batons and that is how it was formed. There is no one who can make me leave it. If there is some garbage which has come into the party then we will wield the jhadu (broom) and clean it.”
Mishra also said that he would not leave AAP and nobody can make him leave it. In addition, he said, “Only I am the person in the cabinet who is not being probed for corruption, who has no CBI case against him and who has not got any relative a prime post in the Delhi government.”
Reacting to his removal from the post as water minister due to “inefficient water management”, as was claimed by deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia on May 6, Mishra questioned why he was removed hours after he wrote to the ACB about corruption in water and met Kejriwal to demand that he come clean on the issue. “In the last two years, see all the interviews of Kejriwal and Sisodia on the issue of water. Was there no problem then or were they lying to the people of Delhi? Even in the municipal polls the party had not found anything wrong with the water supply.”
Mishra said he had written a letter on the tanker scam before this too. “Within a month of becoming a minister, I had prepared a Rs 400-crore tanker scam report and the moment I sent it everyone knows what happened (he was removed from the Delhi Jal Board).”
Yesterday, he said, “I had written a letter to the ACB and then met Arvind Kejriwal. Later when I spoke I was removed. It is a matter of record. It is wrong to say that I spoke because I was removed.”
Mishra also met the lieutenant governor Anil Baijal before making the disclosure. “I had sworn by the constitution and so it was my responsibility to tell him about what I had seen. For the last many days the issue of funding and corruption had been coming to light. We were discussing things with Kejriwal each time. We thought he was the only honest person, he would not take money. We had faith that probably he did not know about the various scams – like the money-laundering scam in Punjab, money laundering case, luxury bus case and ‘Talk to AK’ scam. We always felt that it was a coterie of four-five around him which was responsible.”
He questioned Kejriwal’s decisions to give “certificates of honesty” to Jitendra Singh Tomar, who was made law minister but later removed for possessing a fake degree, and Satyendra Jain, against whom several cases are pending.
Mishra said he will now tell the ACB and Central Bureau of Corruption about the happenings in the Delhi government. “I think it is essential to bring forth Jain’s records and why Kejriwal needed to take cash from him. We always knew that there were some people who are corrupt in this party. A lot of corruption cases would come to light, but the . activists would wait in the hope that Kejriwal would take action.” Now, he said, even that hope is gone.
Responding to the charge, Delhi BJP president Manoj Tiwari said, “I had said in the past too that Kejriwal was directly involved in corruption and the way he has been saving Jain was proof enough that he was directly involved. Mishra’s allegations have proved it. Now Kejriwal should resign.”
Though Kejriwal did not respond to the charge, Sisodia said the decision to remove Mishra from the post was taken after party MLAs complained about poor water supply all across the city. “As for the charges levelled by Mishra,” he said, “they are completely out of place and not even worth commenting on.”