The Jharkhand High Court on August 24 had directed him to surrender by August 30 and on the same day he was shifted to RIMS from jail for treatment.

Ranchi: Lalu Yadav falls ill or slips into depression every time he is summoned by a court or is booked for a crime. From barking dogs to mosquito bites to foul toilet smell, he has faced it all since being convicted for the first time in a series of fodder scam cases in 2013.

This time around, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo has been summoned by Delhi’s Patiala House Court in an IRCTC scam case and yet again, he has a ‘genuine’ reason for not turning up.

Doctors examining him at the Rajendra Institute of Medical Science (RIMS) in Ranchi, where the former Bihar chief minister is admitted at present, have declared him ‘physically unfit to travel’ and authorities at the Birsa Munda Central Jail sprung into action immediately and informed the court of his inability to appear before it on Saturday, RJD legislator Bhola Yadav said.

The court today granted interim bail to Rabri Devi, Tejashwi Yadav and others involved in the case with a conditon that all accused will have to furnish a personal bond of Rs 1 lakh each. The court also fixed November 19 as the next date of hearing and Lalu is expected to appear via video conferencing.

IRCTC scam case: Delhi's Patiala House Court grants interim bail to all accused present in the court in the case filed by Enforcement Directorate. All accused have to furnish a personal bond of Rs 1 lakh with one like amount surety. — ANI (@ANI) October 6, 2018

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), however, opposed the court's grant by saying that the “regular bail will hamper the case investigation”.

On August 24, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had filed its first chargesheet against Lalu, Rabri and others in connection with the IRCTC hotels allotment money laundering case.

ED had also named his son and former Bihar deputy chief minister Tejashwi, party colleague and former union minister Prem Chand Gupta, his wife Sarla Gupta, a firm called Lara Projects, and 10 others in the chargesheet filed under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) before a special court in Delhi.

The agency had said that Lalu and certain IRCTC officials allegedly misused their position to grant sub-lease of the rights of two railway hotels in Puri and Ranchi to Ms Sujata Hotel Pvt Ltd, owned by the Kochhars.

The ED have so far attached assets worth over Rs 44 crore in this case. The FIR filed by CBI had alleged that Lalu, while he was the railway minister in the UPA-1 government, had handed over the maintenance of two IRCTC hotels to a company in 2004 after receiving a bribe in the form of a prime land in Patna through a ‘benami’ company owned by Sarla.

The Jharkhand High Court on August 24 had directed him to surrender by August 30. On the same day he was shifted to RIMS from jail for treatment. He was out on provisional bail since May 11. Lalu was in the Birsa Munda jail after being convicted in December 2017 in a fodder scam case.

Lalu was convicted in two more cases in January and March this year and was awarded 14 years imprisonment. In 2013, Lalu was convicted in the first fodder scam case and sentenced to jail for five years. The multi-million-rupee fodder scam had surfaced in the 1990s when Lalu was Bihar’s chief minister. At the directive of the Patna High Court, the probe was handed over to the CBI.