Patwa Against Minority Status To Jains

Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sunderlal Patwa yesterday reacted sharply to the National Minorities Commission recognising the Jain community as a minority and said that this would only pave the way for yet another division in the Indian society.

At a press conference here, he said that the Jains constituted a section within the Hindu society. The country was facing the present situation due to minoritism and the issue of majority and minorities. This same issue had led to partition of the country, he said.

He also said that Chief Minister Digvijay Singh should resign on moral grounds for his alleged involvement in allotment of land worth more than Rs 13 crore for only Rs 16 lakh at Madhotaal in Jabalpur to the Motor Parts Association.

I am not demanding that Singh should resign, but if he has even a bit of morality left, he should quit office, the former Chief Minister said.

Patwa released a set of documents which, according to him, proved beyond doubt that the decision to allot the prime land for a song had been taken at the initiative of Singh.

He said that the association had applied for the land during 1991 when the BJP was in power, but it had been turned down.

The BJP leader said that when Singh visited Jabalpur on May 13, 1994, the association submitted to him a memorandum urging that the land be allotted to it.

Patwa said that following this the then Jabalpur collector, Vivek Dhand, had written to the revenue secretary on June 1, 1994 requesting that orders be issued to allot the land to the association.

Patwa said that following this, letters were sent from the Chief Ministers secretariat to the revenue secretary, urging that appropriate action be taken on the associations application for land allotment. The application was then submitted to the inter-departmental committee for consideration, he said and added that orders were issued for recovering interest from the association for the period since 1984 when it had been allotted the land on oral orders of the then revenue minister, Muni Prasad Shukla.

The BJP leader said that Shukla had, however, told the Lokayukta that he was not in the habit of giving oral orders.

Replying to questions, the former Chief Minister said that according to his information, the documents that were released by him had not been given to the Lokayukta.

I urge the Chief Minister to supply these documents to the Lokayukta, Patwa said.

Asked why he did not give these documents to the Lokayukta on his own, the senior BJP leader said that his party was yet to decide its action in the matter and added that many avenues were open to it.

Patwa said that Deputy Chief Minister Pyarelal Kanwar and cooperative minister B R Yadav, against whom a first information report (FIR) had been filed by the Lokayukta in the case were merely tools who had acted as per the directives of Singh.

Singh did not sign any document, but circumstantial evidence proves that he is the prime accused in the land allotment case, Patwa alleged.