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On Thursday, JD(U) leader and Bihar Legislative Council member Radha Charan Sah was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on charges of money laundering. Popularly known as Radha Charan Seth, he went from selling jalebis in the 1970s to owning a hotel and other businesses, finally getting elected as MLC from the Bhojpur-Buxar local authority constituency.
The ED took Sah into custody on Wednesday night before formally arresting him on Thursday following day-long raids at his house and rice mill in Arrah town.
While Sah, the JD(U)’s state general secretary for local bodies, said before his arrest that he had “taken loans from three banks for business purposes”, his party claimed the ED action was part of “the BJP’s political vendetta to browbeat its political opponents ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls”.
“I have taken loans from the State Bank of India, the Punjab National Bank and the Bihar Gramin Bank. I wonder how it amounts to money laundering,” Sah said to reporters before his arrest.
Neeraj Kumar, a JD(U) MLC and party spokesperson, told The Indian Express: “While it is a known fact that the BJP has been using Central agencies for political vendettas as per its political convenience, we want to know why the ED does not arrest some Maharashtra politicians who have been under its scanner. Is this what we can call the ‘one nation, one law’ slogan of the BJP?”
BJP state vice-president Santosh Pathak, however, said the arrest was not politically motivated. “Neither the BJP nor the Central government has anything to do with this matter. The Constitution and law will prevail, and anybody who is engaged in wrongdoings will have to pay for that. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already stated from the Red Fort (on Independence Day) that India needs a clean government … and no one engaged in any kind of corrupt practices will be spared. Hence, whatever JD(U) or RJD has to say on the Radha Charan Sah issue is not valid,” Pathak said.
Sah, 65, owns a hotel, a resort, a rice mill and a cold storage facility in Arrah, the district headquarters of Bhojpur. He also owns hotels in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. Sah, who has declared moveable and immoveable assets worth over Rs 5.5 crore, also has an Arms Act and a forgery case pending against him, as per his election affidavit.
Arrah resident P Kumar, said: “We have grown up listening to stories of his rise and rise from a man who ran jalebis outside Jain College (in Arrah) in the early 1970s to the owner of a resort.”
Sah was previously a close aide of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) president Lalu Prasad and former RJD MP Prabhunath Singh, who is currently serving a life term following conviction in murder cases. Sah’s growing businesses and affluence seem to have attracted political parties to him. In 2015, Lalu gave him a ticket to contest MLC polls from Arrah, but he lost.
Then, in the 2022 Legislative Council polls, Sah contested again and won by a comfortable margin.
Earlier this year, Sah had attracted political attention when he hosted a grand party in Arrah and invited several politicians on the occasion of his son Kanhaiya’s 25th wedding anniversary.
