Robert Vadra Robert Vadra

If he had any inkling of the goings on in the power corridors of Haryana these days, the one question Robert Vadra would have never dared to ask again is: Are you serious?

The Manohar Lal Khattar government came to power on October 26 and, as expected, less than a month later - on November 19 - the deputy commissioners of Gurgaon, Faridabad, Palwal and Mewat were instructed to dig out the extent of Vadra's alleged dubious land business in the state's real estate hot spots, initiating a political witch hunt.

During the run-up to the 2014 general and assembly election, the BJP had promised to probe into Congress president Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law's alleged land deals in Haryana and elsewhere if it came to power.

Now, the department of land records and consolidation, under the Haryana government, has written to the deputy commissioners to find out the number of plots bought by Vadra directly or by his company Sky Light Hospitality in their districts.

Gurgaon's deputy commissioner T.L. Satya Prakash told Mail Today that "the investigation into the matter has already been done during the tenure of the previous (Bhupinder Singh Hooda) government. If any authority asks us to file a report in this matter again, we will do so."

The details of only two Vadra properties in Gurgaon are known till now - a 3.5-acre panchayati land in Shikhopur village on the outskirts of the city and a guest house in Mayfield Garden, Sector-51.

IAS officer Ashok Khemka had cancelled the mutation of the Shikhopur land citing irregularities in the allotment process. But the land was re-allotted to Vadra during the last days of the Hooda government.

The residents of Mayfield Garden had also objected to the 25-room guest house in their neighbourhood claiming it would hamper civic infrastructure of their township.

A 3.5-acre plot in Shikhopur village owned by Robert Vadra (right) through his company Sky Light Hospitality on the outskirts of Gurgaon A 3.5-acre plot in Shikhopur village owned by Robert Vadra (right) through his company Sky Light Hospitality on the outskirts of Gurgaon

The guest house is built over 1,000 square yards by combining two equal adjacent plots, N 29 and N 30. While N-29 is registered in the name of Vadra, N-30 is owned by Dharmendra Art Enterprises, a parent company of his trusted aide.

The district administration could not furnish details of any other property as the probe was reportedly hindered by the model code of conduct that came into force before elections in the state in October. It was also alleged that the investigations had slowed down under pressure from the Hooda government.

T.L. Satya Prakash said that district administration is probing 1,000 complaints. "I will not investigate these cases on priority basis just because a high-profile person like Robert Vadra is involved. All disputed matters are equal to me and they will be thoroughly investigated by the district administration," he said. Town and country planning department Continued from page 1 officials claimed that the land use clause of Vadra's real estate was converted from residential to commercial by the state government that issued Change of Land Use (CLU) certificate.

Action has now been initiated into the two missing pages of a file pertaining to the controversial DLFRobert Vadra deal. Khemka, who made the discovery about the missing pages through an RTI application, has sought FIR for the serious lapse. "We have examined the case. There are two angles to this case. One, the same information was provided to some other person under RTI in June. The missing pages were available at that time. The copies also go to the information commissioner.

We will add the pages to the file after we get the copy," said Haryana chief secretary Parveen Kumar Gupta adding that action would be taken for the lapse. Khemka stressed on the seriousness of the lapse claiming these were the pages that would have established the illegality of the three-member Krishna Mohan committee constituted by the Hooda government that gave a clean chit to the deal.

"The file noting is a very important piece of record which would have established that the three members were specifically appointed to an illegally-constituted Committee by the then political executive, where the only remedy to an aggrieved party (Khemka) was to file a writ petition against the order in the high court," said Khemka adding that the team had a predetermined objective give "clean chit to the black-marketing of colony licence by M/s Sky Light Hospitality, a company belonging to Robert Vadra, and to discredit my action of cancelling the land mutation from M/s Sky Light Hospitality to M/s DLF".

(Inputs from Manjeet Sehgal)

