Chandigarh: Senior Haryana IAS officer Vijay Singh Dahiya has been accused of bribery in his role as the commissioner and secretary of the state youth empowerment and entrepreneurship department.
According to the Haryana Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB), Dahiya is under investigation for allegedly seeking Rs 5 lakh in bribe for clearing payments of Rs 50 lakh to a skill centre under the Haryana Skill Development Mission, which is overseen by his department.
Dahiya, who was questioned by the ACB last month, had moved a plea for anticipatory bail in a Panchkula court, and was Monday granted 2 days’ interim bail.
In its reply to the court opposing Dahiya’s bail plea, the ACB has laid out the case it has built against the IAS officer. The evidence, according to the ACB, includes WhatsApp chats between Dahiya and a Delhi woman who allegedly collected bribe on his behalf.
A copy of the reply has been accessed by ThePrint
ThePrint reached Dahiya for a comment by calls but his mobile phone was switched off. A text message didn’t elicit any reply either.
Dahiya is an IAS officer of the 2001 batch.
He is also a member secretary of the Kurukshetra Development Board, and was to accompany Haryana minister Anil Vij to Australia for ‘Gita Mahotsava’. However, Vij proceeded on the Australia tour without him on 25 April.
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The case against Dahiya
According to the ACB’s reply to the court, a Delhi woman named Poonam Chopra was arrested on 20 April for accepting Rs 3 lakh as bribe, allegedly on behalf of Dahiya, from the owner of a skill centre, Rinku Manchanda.
The skill centre, which provides training in computers, AC-related work, and beauty parlour courses, comes under the Haryana Skill Development Mission (Haryana Kaushal Vikas Mission).
The bribe was allegedly meant to get bills to the tune of Rs 50 lakh, submitted by Manchanda, cleared by the Haryana Youth Empowerment and Entrepreneurship Department.
Manchanda claimed in his complaint, quoted in full in the ACB’s reply, that the bills had been stuck with the department for three years.
The ACB reply quotes Manchanda as alleging that Chopra had demanded Rs 5 lakh to get the bills cleared. He paid Rs 2 lakh, and approached the ACB after that.
The bureau said it conducted a raid to arrest Chopra after getting a complaint from Manchanda. During this raid, the ACB added, they got Chopra to call up Dahiya in an effort to catch him red-handed.
During the raid, Chopra called Dahiya on WhatsApp, where they purportedly discussed a meeting between the two.
Dahiya allegedly told Chopra that she was late, after which the latter replied that it was because Manchanda had delayed in giving her “the stuff”.
Accompanied by the raiding team, Chopra then reached a cafe in Sector 8, Chandigarh, to meet Dahiya, where they were “together for over an hour”.
The ACB claimed it confronted Dahiya at the cafe and then took him to its Panchkula office, where he was questioned for nearly 2 to 3 hours. His mobile phone and smartwatch were seized at the restaurant, the ACB said.
During his questioning, Dahiya admitted knowing Chopra but didn’t accept the bribe demand, the ACB added.
The ACB told the court that the relationship between Vijay Singh Dahiya and Poonam Chopra was evident from their “WhatsApp calls and chats” where they discussed matters like “quick clearing of Manchanda’s files, early payments and lack of budget for the current fiscal year”.
The ACB also told the court that they have to recover Rs 13 lakh from Dahiya, saying this was the total amount of bribe taken by him, including from other people. It cited Deepak Sharma, an employee of the Haryana Skill Development Mission, as the source of this information.
An officer of the ACB told ThePrint that the bureau has a watertight case against the IAS officer.
“The ACB has CCTV footage of the restaurant, statements of Poonam Chopra and Deepak Sharma under Section 164 of the CrPC (which deals with confessions and statements recorded before a magistrate), WhatsApp chats, recordings of WhatsApp calls, and Rs 2 lakh recovered from Poonam Chopra’s Delhi residence at the place described by her,” the officer said.
“Rinku Manchanda has also provided the recording device on which he recorded his conversations with the woman. It has also been established that after Poonam Chopra talked to Dahiya about Rinku Manchanda’s bills, the officer had instructed Deepak Sharma to expedite the processing of his files,” he added.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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