Except for the Bettiah Raj, other estates had clear lines of succession. Consequently, the Bettiah Raj came under the ‘court of wards’, and this mammoth estate became the object of accumulation and greed, earlier by the pre-Independence administrators and later by our indigenous governing elites. Fallow land of the Bettiah Raj in Sathi was distributed amongst the elite, instead of the landless, for various considerations in the early fifties. A huge amount of land was settled with a notorious excise commissioner infamous for the molasses scam, allegedly for the matrimonial consideration of his son with regard to the adopted daughter of the then chief minister. Bipin Biharee Verma, the manager of Bettiah Raj, who scripted most of the primitive accumulation and leakage, was said to have had direct patronage from a very prestigious address in Delhi.

When this major scam was detected in Bihar, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel forced the leadership of the state to return the land acquired through stealth, through the Sathi Land Restoration Act in the early fifties. This bill was possibly the first of its kind in the state whereby organised institutional loot was undone through a legislative measure. However, the judicial court later nullified the act and restored the land to the original buyer, putting a seal on that diabolic transaction. The entire story was laid bare in a book named Bapu Ke Saputo Ka Raj by Chandradeo Sharma. This book, published by Chand Press, Jehanabad, was banned by the then government of Bihar.

... contd.