The Indian Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Samajwadi Party on Sunday alleged corruption in a land purchase deal by the Ram Janmabhoomi Trust for the Ram temple in Ayodhya.
The political parties demanded a high-level inquiry into the alleged financial irregularities.
The Ram Janmabhoomi Trust issued a statement denying the charges, The Indian Express reported.
Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh and Samajwadi Party member Pawan Pandey held separate press briefings where they levelled the corruption charges.
Singh claimed that a piece of land valued at Rs5.8 crore was first bought by two persons, Sultan Ansari and Ravi Mohan Tiwari, at Rs2 crore.
He alleged that the land was then sold a few minutes later to the Ram Janmabhoomi Trust at a price of Rs18.5 crore. The land is 12,080 square metres in size, according to Pandey.
Singh and Pandey said that both the papers on the sale deed of the land and the registry have the same witnesses – Anil Mishra, a member of the trust, and Ayodhya Mayor Rishikesh Upadhyay.
Singh also said that the stamp for the deed for the second deal, in which the land was sold to the trust, was bought before Sultan and Tiwari purchased the land at Rs2 crore.
While the stamp paper for the second deal was bought at 5:11pm, the stamp paper for the first deal was purchased at 5:22pm, according to Singh.
Singh alleged that the Trust has duped citizens by collecting money in the name of deity Ram and asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to order a Central Bureau of Investigation or Enforcement Directorate level inquiry into the alleged corruption.
The Ram temple is coming up at the site where the Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992 by Hindutva extremists who were mobilized under the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Ram Janmabhoomi movement.
In November 2019, the Supreme Court in a landmark judgement held the demolition was illegal but handed over the land to government-run trust for the construction of a Ram temple.
In August 2020, Modi laid the foundation stone for the temple.
