Khurana discharged in hawala case

Special Judge V B Gupta on Thursday discharged former Delhi chief minister and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Madan Lal Khurana and four Jain brothers in the Rs 650 million hawala case observing there was no prima facie case against them.

In his 66-page judgment, the judge observed that the prosecution had failed to produce any evidence which could be converted into a prima facie case against Khurana.

There is no material on record for framing charges against any of the accused and as such the case of prosecution thus fails and all accused are hereby discharged, the judge said. The other four accused who have been discharged are S K Jain, J K Jain, B R Jain and N K Jain.

Khurana was chargesheeted by the Central Bureau of Investigation in March last year for allegedly receiving Rs 300,000 from the Jain brothers in 1989.

He resigned as Delhi's chief minister in February 1996 after the CBI sought permission from the Union government to chargesheet him in the hawala case.

Khurana said the issue of his reinstatement as chief minister should be decided by the BJP leadership. He said he had never asked for any post. He is at present a BJP vice-president with charge of two important states.

He said the judgment proves that the case was ''politically motivated'', to discredit him and tarnish his party's image.

''The patently false chargesheet was filed at the behest of then prime minister P V Narasimha Rao, with the sole purpose of showing that the Congress alone is not corrupt,'' he said.

He said he was prompted to resign ''within half an hour'' of the CBI naming him in the hawala case to ''protect the sanctity of public office''. The same cannot be said of chief ministers who threaten to ''run the administration from jail'' (referring to Laloo Yadav of Bihar) instead of resigning from office.