Bengaluru: In early July, 64-year-old activist T.J. Abraham came across a video alleging a scam in the allotment of plots of government land to Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah’s wife. The allegations in the video by Mysuru-based activist Gangaraju hadn’t received much media attention at the time.
“I saw his video… he is rattling out certain figures which are very, very sensitive. When I saw Gangaraju’s video, I said, ‘My God’. There seemed to be something serious, but nobody seemed to be taking him seriously because he did not know how to present it,” Abraham told ThePrint.
Already a seasoned activist, Abraham started digging. He soon came into possession of the documents allotting 14 plots to the CM’s wife, Parvathi, in a high-value Mysuru neighbourhood in the Vijayanagar area. The allocation was purportedly compensation for land the Mysore Urban Development Authority (MUDA) acquired from Parvathi on the outskirts of Mysuru in Kesare — which, Abraham found, is “land which he (the CM or his wife) never had”.
Having taken on at least four Karnataka CMs — S.M. Krishna, H.D. Kumaraswamy, Dharam Singh and B.S. Yediyurappa — since the late 2000s, Abraham was now about to make it five with Siddaramaiah.
On 18 July, Abraham, armed with the documents, approached the Lokayukta police in Mysuru and sought an FIR under various sections of the newly implemented Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Abraham then approached the Mysore Urban Development Authority (MUDA) officials, as well as courts, but with little success.
Meanwhile, Siddaramaiah and the Congress party, including his deputy D.K. Shivakumar, dismissed the allegations as a “conspiracy”. The Opposition, in the July legislative session, played softball as well.
On 6 August, Abraham finally approached Karnataka Governor Thawar Chand Gehlot, and all hell broke loose. A show-cause notice, issued by the governor to Siddaramaiah, triggered a political battle in the state, with allegations and counter-charges by all sides.
Abraham was suddenly in the middle of a constitutional crisis. The ruling party attacked him as a person with “criminal antecedents” while the Opposition did not even acknowledge him.
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‘Accepted that I have to suffer’
After the governor granted his sanction for the prosecution of Siddaramaiah, the CM moved the Karnataka High Court Monday. Gehlot had allowed his prosecution “without application of mind” and “totally contrary to the established legal principles”, the CM claimed.
The governor’s show-cause notice mentioned that besides the complaint by Abraham, he had received two others against Siddaramaiah in the same case — from activists Snehamayi Krishna and Pradeep Kumar.
The governor mentioned all three complaints despite not acting on the other two complaints or mentioning them earlier, one person from Siddaramaiah’s legal team told ThePrint, requesting anonymity. “He has used them only to bolster his notice to Siddaramaiah — which is in contravention to the law,” the person said.
All three activists, along with the state of Karnataka and the governor’s office, are now listed as respondents in the case.
Most of the heat against Abraham is over his credibility, referring to an FIR registered by the state police against him in the first week of August. In the FIR, Abraham stands accused of trying to extort Rs 1 crore from a government official last year.
Speaking to ThePrint, Abraham said many such “false cases” had hurt him but not “demotivated” him. “I have accepted that I have to suffer,” he said.
Abraham, who adds the suffix “Hindustani” to his name on his X bio, refers to himself as an anti-corruption crusader. He also makes videos and posts analysing local and national elections in India, and comments on sensitive topics such as the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) and National Register of Citizens (NRC), among others.
He also runs a consultancy firm, looking after administrative functions of several educational institutions, which, he said, gives him the “fuel” or money to pursue his activism.
His other business is doing due diligence for various projects, including checking and rectifying property papers. This work, he said, gave him the knowledge to identify irregularities in land deals.
Abraham is an alumnus of St Germain School, Christ College (now Christ University) and RC College in Bengaluru.
Abraham comes from a modest household; his parents were government employees. He said that his first complaint, lodged nearly 25 years ago, was against media houses for criticising judges of the Supreme Court and the High Court. “Even though I was not a lawyer, I said that the judiciary is the last resort for the common man,” he said.
Abraham said that he had “sacrificed a lot for the public interest”, which people cannot gauge or understand. He refused to divulge more details on this because it would “embarrass a lot of people who benefited from it”.
He contested the 2003 state assembly elections on a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) ticket from the K.R. Pura constituency in Bengaluru. He also contested the 2013 and 2018 elections from Bidar South in north Karnataka.
Abraham, however, said the latter two were not “serious attempts” but only to use the election as a platform to tell people not to vote for Ashok Kheny, businessman and MD of Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprise or NICE, whom Abraham accused of widespread corruption. Kheny won the election in 2013 but was defeated in 2018.
Abraham was arrested in 2012 in an 11-year-old case of assault on a businessman soon after he levelled allegations of irregularities in the Bengaluru-Mysuru Expressway project.
There are several other cases involving defamation against him. In one of these cases, the Supreme Court had slapped a Rs 25 lakh fine on him but later reduced it to Rs 1 lakh.
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Complaints against Karnataka CMs
Contrary to the claims that MUDA had allotted Parvathi compensatory land, Abraham’s complaint said that she neither possessed any land in Kesare on the outskirts of Mysuru, nor did MUDA encroach on her land.
Abraham’s complaint also dismissed other claims — for instance, that her brother gifted her the plots in Kesare after their purchase in 2004. The plots in the village of Kesare had been developed, renamed, and distributed in 2001, and there was no question of any purchase in 2004, the complaint said.
With these points, Abraham accused the CM of illegally claiming the land in Kesare on paper only and then going on to acquire the 14 high-value plots in return.
“They created these papers (of Kesare land purchase and gifting) to knock off the land (in the high-value Mysuru neighbourhood) in lieu,” Abraham told ThePrint.
Abraham said that as president of the Anti-Graft/Corruption and Environmental Forum, he was the first to raise questions about the alleged role of former Karnataka CM S.M. Krishna (later India’s external affairs minister) in illegal mining in the state.
Based on his complaint that Krishna approved mining on forest land for personal gain when he was CM between 1999 and 2004, a special court in Karnataka ordered an investigation, but the Supreme Court stayed the probe in 2012.
According to Abraham’s complaint, Singh ordered the issuance of temporary transport permits to move iron ore from lands classified as agricultural, resulting in a loss of over Rs 23 crore to the state coffers.
Similarly, Abraham accused H.D. Kumaraswamy, now a Union minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of approving mining leases for 550 acres in favour of Sree Sai Venkateshwara Minerals and colluding with Janthakal Mining Company for personal gain.
Moreover, his complaint against B.S. Yediyurappa for receiving money through shell companies forced the BJP to remove the Lingayat strongman as CM in 2021.
Abraham named Yediyurappa, his son B.Y. Vijayendra, grandson Shashidhar Maradi, son-in-law Sanjay Sree, minister S.T. Somashekar, and other senior IAS and IPS officers in the money laundering case over clearances given to a private firm, Ramalingam Construction Company Private Limited, for a housing project. The accusation was that the Yediyurappa family took bribes of Rs 12 crore, including Rs 5 crore from Kolkata-based shell companies.
Abraham approached then Karnataka governor Vajubhai Vala to prosecute Yediyurappa, but Vala denied the request.
In 2011, Abraham was also one of the petitioners whose complaint was accepted and acted upon by then governor Hansraj Bhardwaj in the illegal land de-notification scandal, which led to the arrest of Yediyurappa. At the time, two other advocates, Sirajin Basha and K.N. Balraj, filed complaints with the governor for the prosecution of Yediyurappa.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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