BJP’s cash-for-votes trail: Rs 9.93 lakh found in Vinod Tawde’s Palghar hotel

A senior BJP leader close to the RSS and the party's national general secretary, Vinod Tawde is said to have been a frontrunner for the chief minister's chair in the Mahayuti coalition.

However, today, 19 November, he was caught red-handed, distributing cash from a Virar hotel room just a day before polling in Maharashtra, per Bahujan Vikas Aghadi (BVA) workers.

Now the district authorities in Palghar say that a police team comprising senior officials have recovered Rs 9.93 lakh cash and some incriminating documents from the hotel.

Releasing video clips on social media, which quickly went viral, BVA leaders claimed earlier in the day that they were tipped by insiders within the BJP that Tawde was in the hotel with Rs 5 crore in cash.

BVA MLA Kshitij Thakur claimed that he did not believe the information was genuine at first, and went to Hotel Vivant to check. He found that the CCTV cameras had been switched off. At his insistence, they were switched on and he could see Tawde distributing cash, he claimed.

This was followed by BVA workers gatecrashing Tawde's party, shouting ‘chor, chor’ and heckling the BJP leader, whose security detail was found to include police officers. The BVA members demanded that an FIR be registered immediately and threatened to detain Tawde in the hotel until polling was completed on Wednesday, 20 November.

Kshitij Thakur snatched the bag carrying cash and a red diary from Tawade, in which names of the recipients and the amounts had purportedly been recorded. Tawade apparently pleaded with Thakur to let him go, but was detained for several hours inside the hotel room. 

Tawde, who was later allowed to go, in a video statement demanded an ‘impartial’ inquiry by the Election Commission and denied the charge that he was involved in distributing cash. He had visited the hotel to tell party workers about the rules to be followed during the polling scheduled tomorrow, he claimed.

The claim is being taken with a pinch of salt, because the BJP trains its booth-level workers days in advance and is unlikely to leave it till the last moment.

It would also be unusual for a national general secretary to hold the training in an assembly constituency with a handful of people in a hotel room.

Tawde, who is said to have been a front runner for the chief minister’s office in case the Mahayuti coalition won, is believed to have been trapped by rivals within the BJP.

A prominent OBC face in the party, observers suspect that like Eknath Khadse and Pankaja Munde before him, he too has been trapped by factions within the party that do not want an OBC member to become the chief minister.

Observers also point out that BVA leader Bhai Thakur, a strongman, is known to have close relations with Devendra Fadnavis, the home minister and an aspirant to the chief minister's chair himself.

District collector and election officer Govind Bodke said the election department had received complaints from BVA activists that some BJP workers were distributing cash at a hotel in Virar.

Following this, the returning officer of Nalla Sopara and a police team, along with the joint police commissioner and two deputy police commissioners, searched the hotel and recovered Rs 9.93 lakh cash and some incriminating documents, the official said.

The collector, in a recorded message, confirmed that cases were registered for offences, including possession of cash, violation of the model code of conduct, and holding illegal press conferences.

The police were probing into the crimes, he said, without revealing against whom these offences were registered.

The opposition, of course, has seized on the videos as confirmation that the BJP was spending colossal amounts of money to win the election.

Journalist Ashok Wankhede claimed on Tuesday that contrary to his earlier information that as much as Rs 10,000 was being paid for each vote, in some constituencies, parties were pledging double that amount. He quoted another journalist travelling in the poll-bound state as saying that a candidate had confessed to having paid for 25,000 kilograms of mutton to feed voters.

The Election Commission of India, which claims to have seized cash, gold and liquor worth Rs 1,000 crore in Jharkhand and Maharashtra in the run-up to the elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand this time — seven times more than the last election in 2019 — is yet to react to the ‘cash for vote’ allegations against the BJP leader.

Meanwhile, according to reports coming in, the BVA candidate from the nearby constituency of Dahanu has joined the BJP — hours before polling is to start on 20 November.

With PTI inputs