New Delhi: Sanjay Prakash Rai ‘Sherpuria’, a businessman who was arrested recently by the Uttar Pradesh Police for duping people by allegedly claiming access to Prime Minister’s Office, had lent Rs 25 lakh to Jammu and Kashmir lieutenant governor, Manoj Sinha, as an “unsecured loan” before the 2019 general elections.
It has now emerged that Sinha himself, in his election affidavit, had disclosed that he had a loan of Rs 57 lakh in total, of which he borrowed Rs 25 lakh from Rai. The affidavit had also disclosed that he had four other “unsecured” loans from other individuals amounting to Rs 3 lakh, Rs 6 lakh, Rs 8 lakh, and Rs 15 lakh.
Sinha was an MP from the Ghazipur Lok Sabha constituency in Uttar Pradesh between 2014 and 2019. However, his re-election bid as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate in 2019 was unsuccessful. He lost to Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidate Afzal Ansari.
In August 2020, Sinha was appointed as the LG of Jammu and Kashmir, nearly a year after Article 370 was abrogated and the erstwhile state was downgraded to a Union territory.
Sinha, who was also Ghazipur MP twice before in 1996 and 1999, remained active in the party and the constituency even after his loss in the 2019 election. However, after his appointment as LG, he has stayed away from party activities owing to his constitutional position.
According to Indian Express, a source close to Sinha claimed that the L-G has had no contact with Rai since 2015-16. Also, a detailed questionnaire sent to Sinha on alleged links with Rai went unanswered.
“The L-G was transparent and declared the money received as unsecured loan in the affidavit,” the source said, adding that L-G has “made many attempts to reach out to him and return the money”, but Rai has been unavailable.
Meanwhile, Ghazipur BJP president, Bhanupratap Singh, distanced the party from Rai. “Rai is neither a member nor an office bearer of the BJP. He used to visit Ghazipur and meet us but he has nothing to do with the party,” he told the newspaper.
Another prominent leader from Varanasi, the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said, “Rai was known for his proximity to senior party leaders and whenever he came here, local party leaders regularly met him.”
Rai ended up in the police’s net recently after police received information that he had taken Rs 6 crore from Gaurav Dalmiya, a Delhi-based businessman, promising to get his name cleared from a probe being carried out against him by a central investigation agency, according to Dainik Bhaskar.
The Uttar Pradesh Police’s special task force (STF) arrested him on Wednesday, April 26, at Kanpur railway station while he was traveling from Delhi to Ghazipur. He was handed over to Vibhuti Khand police station. Two days prior, Rai’s aide, Kashif, was arrested in Noida after police conducted searches at multiple locations in Noida.
Rai runs an organisation called “For Youth,” an NGO, with the slogan to make Ghazipur self-sufficient through self-employment. There are allegations that he has routed his alleged ill-gotten money through his NGO.
The Dainik Bhaskar report shows photographs of Rai with several of the BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leaders, including J.P. Nadda, Anurag Thakur, Keshav Prasad Maurya and Mohan Bhagwat. The Wire cannot immediately confirm the veracity of these pictures.
Rai is said to have been a BJP ticket aspirant from the Ghazipur assembly constituency in 2017. However, he failed to secure a ticket. He is also said to have been involved in the 2019 BJP parliamentary election campaign from Varanasi, represented by Modi. He also authored a book on Modi, Divya Drishti Modi.
