Forgery case: Rajasthan court issues arrest warrant against former minister

Singh, who was the Union minister of state for Home, is accused of forging his uncle’s signature to transfer his properties to himself. The court said that Singh and the two others, “fraudulently, and to gain an unfair benefit, tried to deceive the court by submitting a fake trust deed while presenting it as genuine.”

While the orders were issued on November 18, complainant Avinash Chandra Chandna’s lawyers received a certified copy of the order on Friday.

The matter pertains to the properties of the erstwhile royal family of Bundi in Rajasthan. Bundi’s last king, Maharaja Bahadur Singh, had two children, Ranjeet Singh and Mahendra Kumari. As Ranjeet Singh staked claim to the property via rule of primogeniture, Mahendra Kumari filed a case in a Bundi court in 1986, seeking the division of the properties.

Ranjeet Singh had married but had no children while Mahendra Kumari married Pratap Singh and gave birth to Bhanwar Jitendra Singh and Meenakshi. As the case dragged on, Mahendra Kumari passed away in 2002 and Jitendra Singh fought the case as her representative.

Then in 2005, a local court divided the property equally between Ranjeet Singh and Jitendra Singh but the division could not take place after Singh reportedly appealed against the order and got a stay. Ranjeet Singh eventually died in 2010. In 2017, Delhi resident Avinash Chandra Chandna claimed that he was close to Ranjeet Singh and his family and that Singh used to stay at his residence in Delhi, where Singh breathed his last. Moreover, Singh had transferred his properties to Chandna in March 2009.

Chanda alleged that after Ranjeet passed away, Jitendra created a trust with forged signatures of Ranjeet Singh in backdate of May 2008. The fake trust papers, Chandna alleged, say that Ranjeet Singh committed all his property towards his ‘Kul Devi’ Ashapura Mataji in the form of a trust and made Jitendra Singh chief ‘sewayat’ (one who serves an idol at a temple) or a trustee and Shri Nath Singh as an assistant sewayat.

“Since Ranjeet Singh did not have any offspring, he (Jitendra) wanted to usurp the properties,” says Chandna, who lodged an FIR in Bundi in 2017 against Singh and others.

Singh approached the High Court against the FIR, which disposed of his plea in 2018, observing that had Ranjeet Singh issued such a document, he would have mentioned it before the High Court in December 2008, instead of praying that he gets his share of properties during his lifetime.

The CJM court noted that that Singh did not provide the original copy of the trust deed to the investigating officer but a report by a private forensic laboratory authenticating the trust deed as genuine. Bundi police shut the 2017 case lodged by Chandna, apparently on the basis of that report, prompting Chandna to challenge the police’s Final Report.

Singh did not respond to calls and messages.