Kejriwal playing Pawar politics, ignoring Lavasa scam: YP Singh

Lawyer YP Singh, who has fought cases related to corruption and involving the state government in the past, today accused activist-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal of focussing on the wrong scam by speaking about BJP president Nitin Gadkari instead of agriculture minister Sharad Pawar. Singh today presented documents which he said showed the complicity of Pawar, his nephew and former deputy chief minister of Maharashtra Ajit Pawar and his daughter Supriya Sule in allowing the building of the Lavasa township near Pune city. [caption id=“attachment_495380” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Did Kejriwal pick the wrong target? PTI[/caption] 101 hectares of land had been sanctioned by Ajit Pawar to Lake city corporation that developed Lavasa for a 3-year-lease at Rs 23,000 per month, and the company had both Supriya Sule and her husband were stakeholders, Singh said. Sule and her husband then offloaded their stake in the company to Lavasa Corporation, a subsidiary of construction firm HCC, at a higher valuation for profit, the lawyer alleged. He alleged that the project received benefits from Pawar and his nephew including higher FSI for buildings built in the project. “What role did Sharad Pawar have to decide the FSI for Lavasa while he was Agriculture Minister?” the lawyer said. The lawyer said that he had given all the documents related to the scam to Kejriwal but the activist turned politician had chosen not speak on it and instead focussed on BJP president Nitin Gadkari, who according to Singh was involved in a far smaller scam. “We thought Kejriwal would take this matter to its logical conclusion but since he hasn’t we will do it,” he said. The lawyer claimed that it was possible that Kejriwal wanted to appear impartial and politically unbiased to improve his newly formed party’s performance in the upcoming Delhi elections, due to which he had chosen to target Gadkari after Robert Vadra. “Anna Hazare took up Lavasa case initially but later dropped it. I thought he would take up the matter strongly in his rallies…..I don’t know why Anna Hazare had a soft corner for Sharad Pawar ,” he said. The lawyer said he would approach the Anti-Corruption Bureau of the state police with the evidence that he had collected along with Kejriwal and if they failed to take the matter forward, they would approach the courts. Meanwhile, the Kejriwal-led organisation India  Against Corruption defended themselves saying that they had made the documents public earlier and it was part of the list of allegations they had made against 15 union ministers in the past. “The matter is not about who raises the allegations but that we fight corruption unitedly,” Sisodia told reporters after Singh’s press conference. Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar also refuted the allegations leveled him and said that the government and he had acted in accordance with policy. “We decided to create hill stations. There was a law created called the Hill Station policy,” Pawar said, adding that two projects had been sanctioned in Maharashtra based on it: the Lavasa project and the Amby valley project. “The matter is before the court presently. But we had attempted to make a good hill station in country in the form of Lavasa,” he said. “If you go to Lavasa you will see what good work is being done there, there is no wrong work being done there. Thousands visit Lavasa daily,” the minister said.