New Delhi: One of Bihar government’s most influential civil servants and a former MLA from the state’s principal opposition party allegedly entered a partnership a decade ago and went on to not only operate a CNG station out of state but also rape a woman for seven years before she reached the court seeking a case against them.
These are the broader details of two related cases against IAS officer Sanjeev Hans, the principal secretary of the energy department in Bihar, and Gulab Yadav, the former Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) MLA from the Jhanjharpur assembly constituency, brought by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Bihar Police.
As part of its investigation, the ED, last week, carried out raids across 20 locations over two days, covering Hans’ residence in Bihar’s Patna, his wife’s place in Delhi, his home in Punjab’s Amritsar, and Yadav’s residences in Jhanjharpur and Patna.
Sources in the ED said the action came after an Enforcement Complaint Information Report, earlier this year. The ED money laundering case against the power duo came after the Bihar Police lodged an FIR against them for the rape of a former lawyer. The woman, in 2021, filed a petition in a local court, seeking directions to Patna police to register the FIR.
During the raids, the ED seized 15 watches of luxury brands such as Rado, Rolex and Monte Blank — worth approximately Rs 40 lakh — from Hans’ premises in Patna, along with 1,100 grams of gold.
Speaking to ThePrint, Gulab Yadav denied all allegations in the gangrape case, calling it a “conspiracy to pin him politically” in the constituency he formerly held.
Meanwhile, multiple attempts to reach out to Hans through phone calls and messages and the officer on special duty under him turned out to be futile. This copy will be updated if and when Hans responds.
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‘Gangrape for seven years’
ThePrint has seen a copy of the police FIR against the duo registered under sections 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 341 (wrongful restraint), 376(rape), 376 (D) (gangrape), 420 (cheating), 313 (non-consensual abortion), 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace), 506 (criminal intimidation), 34 (common intention) and 120(B) (criminal conspiracy) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS).
This case has become the predicate offence in the ED’s money laundering case.
According to the rape survivor’s petition to the additional chief judicial magistrate, Danapur, in 2021, she was practising law till 2015 at the Patna High Court before moving on to the Allahabad High Court in 2016. When she was in Patna in February 2016, her colleague introduced her to Gulab Yadav, then the MLA of Madhubani’s Jhanjharpur. The petition said that Yadav promised to get her appointed as a Bihar State Women Commission member and asked her to visit his residence in Patna with her resume. But, when the woman reached his residence, Yadav allegedly tried to force him on her and ultimately raped her at gunpoint, it added.
The petition said that Yadav soon gathered that she was likely to file a complaint of rape, and hence, he promised to marry her and asked for time to complete divorce formalities with his wife. Later, Yadav asked her to meet him at a hotel in Pune to check the court papers for his divorce, and at the hotel, on 8 July 2017, he, along with Hans, laced her food with intoxicants and raped her, according to the petition.
Then, the duo allegedly blackmailed her with threats of leaking videos of her rape online and continued to rape her for nearly seven years. The petition further alleged that they impregnated her and threatened her life when she refused an abortion, and that forced her to move to Delhi, where she gave birth to a son in 2018.
The petition also said that when she approached Yadav to inform him of the child, he allegedly said he had done a vasectomy to hold that the child had no relation to him while Hans just refused to entertain her.
The petition also said that the Rupaspur police station in Patna refused to register a complaint when the woman reached there, calling the duo “influential people”. It added that even a written complaint to Patna’s senior superintendent of police on 28 October 2021 did not yield any result, with the woman finally forced to approach the local court.
After Bihar Police registered the case FIR based on the court’s directions, Gulab Yadav approached the Patna High Court, seeking a quashing of the FIR. The HC, in May 2023, ordered that no coercive action should be taken in the case, that is, stayed the proceedings of the case, advocate Dinu Kumar, who represented the rape survivor in court, told ThePrint.
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‘Decade-long association’
Sources told ThePrint that Hans and Yadav grew close to each other exploring business opportunities during Hans’s tenure as the district magistrate in Yadav’s home district, Madhubani.
“Hans was the Madhubani DM in 2012-23 when they formed bonds, which are still intact,” an ED source told ThePrint.
Another ED source said the duo operated a CNG filling station in Pune, Maharashtra. The CNG station remains registered as a joint venture between Hans’ wife and Yadav — which is “suggestive” of the soaring business association between the two.
Yadav quit RJD before the 2024 Lok Sabha election after the party denied him a ticket from the Jhanjharpur parliamentary seat, which, instead of the RJD, Mukesh Sahani’s Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) from the INDIA bloc contested.
After quitting RJD, Yadav joined the Bahujan Samaj Party to contest from Jhanjharpur but came a distant third after Janata Dal (United)’s Rampreet Mandal and VIP’s Suman Kumar Mahaseth.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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