Vigilance Bureau arrests former Punjab minister Bharat Bhushan Ashu

Tribune News Service

Ruchika M. Khanna

Chandigarh, August 22

Former Food and Supply minister Bharat Bhushan Ashu has been arrested up by a team of Punjab Vigilance Bureau from Ludhiana, for irregularities in the tender allotment scam.

He is the second minister from the previous Congress government to have been arrested by the AAP government on charges of corruption.  In June, the Punjab Vigilance Bureau arrested former minister and Congress leader Sadhu Singh Dharamsot on corruption charges.

The minister was picked up within hours of having staged a dharna along with his Congress party colleagues outside the office of Vigilance Bureau in Mohali this morning.

He was arrested from a salon in Ludhiana.

The arrest came hours after Ashu along with other senior Punjab Congress leaders "presented" themselves at the Vigilance Bureau office in Mohali, saying it could detain any of them as they were fed up with the AAP government in Punjab levelling corruption allegations against them.

Ashu, at the dharna, had said he was innocent and that the Vigilance Bureau should arrest him if they had any incriminating evidence against him.

Though initially the name of the minister was not mentioned as an accused in the preferential allotment of tenders for labour, cartage and transportation of food grains, the interrogation of the contractor awarded the contract, Telu Ram, had proved the involvement of the former minister in the scam.

Tenders were allotted to the contractor by changing the tender allotment rules.

Sources in the Vigilance Bureau told The Tribune that when the team of Vigilance Bureau went to arrest the former minister, he called MP Ravneet Bittu to the salon.

“Since the latter misbehaved with the officials, we are writing to the Commissioner of Police, Ludhiana, to register a case against the MP for obstructing the government officers from performing their duty,” a top officer in Vigilance Bureau told The Tribune.