Brush with law nothing new for former MLA, wife

NEW DELHI:

Former Bihar MLA Raj Kumar Singh

and his wife Renu Singh, both of whom have been taken in by the cops in the case related to the killing of Archana Gupta in celebratory fire on December 31, are entrepreneurs and real-estate tycoons in Muzaffarpur, Bihar. More popular as Raju Singh, the former legislator had started as a builder in his village in Sahebganj and later gone on to own a mall. Renu is a three-time member of the Bihar legislative council.


Raju’s father, Uday Pratap Singh, used to head the panchayat at Anandpur Kharuni village of Paru block in Sahebgang. Raju entered politics in 2005 and was elected MLA from Sahebganj for the first time as a candidate of the Lok Janshakti Party in February that year. He changed his affiliation to Janata Dal (United) a few months later and fought the elections held in October 2005 and was re-elected to the state assembly. He repeated his feat in 2010, but lost as a BJP candidate in 2015. However, he got his wife selected as an MLC from East Champaran.




The politician-entrepreneur set up his own pharmacy business in the early 2000s and expanded to cities across India. Later he invested in companies based in Russia and US. Many people believe that after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the economic downturn that followed in the early 1990s, Raju Singh's family started an extension of their pharmacy business in the erstwhile USSR and made a fortune.




Police disclosed that this was not the first time that the three-time MLA was embroiled in a criminal case. According to the affidavit he submitted to the election commission at the time of polls, a case of child trafficking was registered against him in 2006 at Paroo in Bihar and another related to the assault of a policeman was registered in 1999. Raju Singh was also in the eye of a controversy in 2013 when his election agent, Bhola Singh, was gunned dead. The politician had blamed his political rivals and the Maoists for the murderous attack.