Adarsh panel indicts former CMs,Maharashtra cabinet rejects report

“Adarsh project would not have come into existence without the politicians’ patronage it received right from the beginning,” the report said.

The Maharashtra government,however,rejected the report at a cabinet meeting in the morning. The three-line Action Taken Report tabled by it said,“Out of the 13 terms of reference,the government accepts only two that said land belonged to state government and not Centre. And that the Adarsh project was not for housing the Kargil war heroes.”

Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan gave no reason for the rejection beyond saying the cabinet had taken a “unanimous decision” and that there was “consensus”. “The report encompassing the critical role of politicians and a dozen bureaucrats has been rejected,” he said.

The report of the two-member commission chaired by retired high court judge J A Patil indicted state Minister for Water Resources Sunil Tatkare and Minister for Higher and Technical Education Rajesh Tope — both belonging to Congress ally Nationalist Congress Party — for misusing their political positions to promote the Adarsh project.

The report has found 25 of the 102 beneficiaries to be ineligible for the ownership of the flats. Among them is Devyani Khobragade,the Indian diplomat currently at the centre of a noisy diplomatic row between India and the US,former Maharashtra speaker Babasaheb Kupekar,former Shiv Sena MP Suresh Prabhu and three relatives of Ashok Chavan.

Flats were found to have been purchased through benami transactions in 22 other cases.

Twelve bureaucrats have been found guilty of violating conduct of service rules. They are former secretaries to the chief minister Subhash Lalla and C S Sangitrao,former collectors of Mumbai Pradeep Vyas and I A Kundan,former municipal commissioner Jairaj Phatak,former principal secretary Ramanand Tiwari,former chief secretary D K Sankaran,former deputy secretaries Thomas Benjamin and P V Deshmukh,former MMRDA commissioners Suresh Joshi and T Chandrashekhar,and former town and country planner Umesh V Luktuke.

The BJP reacted sharply to the rejection of the report. Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley tweeted,“The JPC buried the 2G scandal. The Maharashtra Cabinet buries the Adarsh fraud. Can truth be ever buried?”

Tatkare and Tope denied any role in the scam,saying that as ministers of state,UDD,they had no authority to take decisions,and that merely meeting a few people cannot be construed as promoting the project. Both Congress and NCP ministers took an aggressive stance at the cabinet meeting,saying the government must not accept the commission’s findings. Some ministers said the government should not table it in the winter session.

According to the report,the cooperative housing society was conceived in 1994 by R C Thakur,Brig (retd) M M Wanchoo and others,but they could not secure land in the Colaba area. They then sought the help of MLC Kanhaiyalal Gidwani,who for some time became the chief promoter of the society and promised to use his political influence to find a suitable plot.