After Valmiki scam, illegal fund transfer scam hits Wakf Board; complaint lodged
Bengaluru (PTI): Close on the heels of the Valmiki Corporation scam where a sum of between Rs 88 crore and Rs 187 crore was misappropriated, the Karnataka State Board of Auqaf has lodged a police complaint against its former chief executive officer Zulfiqarulla for illegally moving over Rs 4 crore of its funds.
Incumbent CEO Meer Ahmed Abbas has accused his predecessor of causing a loss of Rs 8.03 crore in total to the state exchequer.
In a complaint to the High Grounds Police Station, Abbas said that the state government had "encroached" a Wakf property belonging to Gulbarga Dargah and paid Rs 2.29 crore in return. Further, the Wakf Board had received Rs 1.79 crore from the Religious Endowment Department (Muzrai department).
"This way, Rs 4,00,45,465 was deposited in the Indian Bank account at the Benson Town Branch. On November 26, 2016, transferred the amount to the Vijaya Bank account of the CEO, Wakf Board in Chintamani branch (in Chikkaballapura district)," the complainant said.
Abbas stated that Zulfiqarulla did not bring this transfer of money to the notice of the Wakf Board, which caused the board a loss of Rs 8.04 crore. This amount is said to have been arrived at by assuming that compound interest would have accrued on the sum of Rs 4,00,45,465 in the past eight years if it had been invested appropriately.
The complaint states that on March 31, 2022 it was deemed that the reply given by Zulfiqarulla about the alleged misappropriation of funds was unsatisfactory. However, only two years later, on June 12, 2024 did the board decide that a complaint would be filed about the matter, and accordingly a case was registered on July 6, 2024.
The complaint filed in the Waqf board scam comes close on the heels of a similar scam being brought to light recently, wherein funds were misappropriated from the Karnataka Maharshi Valmiki Scheduled Tribe Development Corporation.
Police have arrested former minister B Nagendra in the Valmiki Corporation scam, along with 11 other persons.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
