Congress’s Datia MLA Rajendra Bharti convicted in 28-year-old bank fraud case, sent to Tihar

NEW DELHI: Holding that "documents do not lie," a Delhi court has convicted Datia's Congress MLA Rajendra Bharti and co-accused Raghuvir Sharan Prajapati in a cheating and forgery case involving a cooperative bank, finding clear evidence of manipulation of fixed deposit (FD) records using correction fluid to alter the tenure of the deposit. Bharti, 67, was sent to jail though the hearing of the quantum of the sentence has been scheduled for Thursday. The Datia MLA has been found guilty under sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 420 (cheating), 467 (forgery of valuable securities), 468 (forgery for purposes of cheating), and 471 (dishonest use of forged documents) of the IPC. If given a sentence of two or more years, he faces automatic termination of his assembly membership. The case centres on a 1998 fixed deposit opened in the name of Bharti's mother, Savitri Shyam, where complainant Zila Sahkari Krishi Aur Grahmin Vikas Bank alleged that the accused conspired to alter bank records to extend the deposit tenure from three years to 15 years to unlawfully draw higher interest on a fixed deposit of Rs 10 lakh in his mother's name. Underscoring the prime role, Judge Dig Vinay Singh noted Bharti was the trustee of the beneficiary trust and chairperson of the bank "during the time when the amount was cheated." Based on the material on record, the court surmised that it "gives rise to no other inference that he was part of the criminal conspiracy with accused Prajapati, Savitri, and possibly some unknown persons in cheating the bank after committing forgery." Linking Bharti to the offence, the court observed that his role as trustee of the beneficiary trust and chairperson of the bank at the time clearly alluded to his involvement in the conspiracy. The court also termed Bharti's claim of political targeting as "all speculation". "It is a case of forgery of bank documents and cheating the bank from 1998 to 2011, which is long before the alleged political rivalry claimed by Bharti," the judge highlighted. Prajapati's defence of acting under instructions or coercion was also dismissed as false and inconsistent. "He received several out-of-turn promotions as undue favours from Bharti, which served as a quid pro quo for the forgery," the judge remarked in the order. Bharti had won the assembly election from Datia in November 2023, defeating senior BJP leader and former Madhya Pradesh home minister Narottam Mishra by a margin of nearly 8,000 votes.