Mumbai: In 2013, Baban Bhosale, a former Army serviceman, was walking to Mumbai’s Churchgate station when he came across some people with donation boxes.
Kirit Somaiya, a former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP, and his son Neil were among them. They all wore T-shirts proclaiming ‘Vikrant Vachwa’ or ‘Save Vikrant’—the Navy’s iconic aircraft carrier.
“With a feeling of patriotism in my heart, I put Rs 2,000 in the steel box,” Bhosale told ThePrint.
But in November 2014, INS Vikrant, which had played an important part in the 1971 India-Pakistan War, was reduced to scrap.
Bhosale wondered what had happened to his donation. In April 2022, he lodged a police complaint to get an answer to his questions. “I lodged it purely with the intention of finding out what happened to my money,” he said. At the time, the Maha Vikas Aghadi, comprising the undivided Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress, was in power in Maharashtra.
Two years and four months later, Bhosale still has no answers despite several rounds of statements and court hearings.
The Mumbai Police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) concluded that the “crime comes under the category of neither true nor false”.
Bhosale alleges Somaiya collected Rs 57 crore through his ‘Save Vikrant drive,’ a figure he admits he picked up from media reports.
The EOW pegs the figure at Rs 10,000.
Moreover, other than a tweet by Somaiya on 17 December, 2013 about his intentions of meeting the then governor of Maharashtra, K. Sankaranarayanan, there are no known records of any money being handed over for the cause.
Save Vikrant the Warship BJP Shiv Sena delegation meeting Rashtrapati today at 1.15pm to Save Vikrant Shahido ko Salam Museum
— Kirit Somaiya (@KiritSomaiya) December 17, 2013
The EOW filed a closure report in December 2022, months after the Eknath Shinde-led coalition government, comprising the Shiv Sena and the BJP, came to power.
But on 8 August this year, a Mumbai magistrates’ court refused to accept this closure report.
“Further investigation in the matter is necessary,” said the additional chief judicial magistrate, S.P. Shinde.
ThePrint reached Somaiya, who was the BJP MP for the Mumbai North East constituency from 1999 to 2004 and from 2014 to 2019, via phone calls and left a message at his office. ThePrint has also reached Vinay Ghorpade, who was the EOW’s investigating officer in the case, via phone calls and texts. This article will be updated when responses are received.
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The politics around INS Vikrant
INS Vikrant, a Majestic-class aircraft carrier originally laid down for the Royal Navy during World War 2, was still incomplete when India purchased it in 1957. It was completed and commissioned into the Indian Navy in 1961, and went on to serve for 36 years before it was finally decommissioned in 1997.
Two years later, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee gifted the ship to Maharashtra to be converted into a museum.
In 2012-2013, the Maharashtra government—then led by a coalition of the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)—told the defence ministry it was unable to maintain the ship, which led the Navy to decide to auction the aircraft carrier.
Ahead of the assembly elections in 2014, the BJP and the undivided Shiv Sena blamed the Congress-NCP government for “not being able to maintain the ship”.
The Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece, Saamana, wrote editorials about how the state government could not even gather money to convert the ship into a maritime museum. It waxed eloquent about how its late leader, Bal Thackeray, had wanted this to happen so that future generations could feel pride in India’s history.
Somaiya, who was gearing up for Lok Sabha elections then, was at the forefront of a campaign to save Vikrant. He even wrote a letter to the defence minister against the central government’s decision to auction the ship.
Apart from Somaiya, activists from the BJP and the Republican Party of India (RPI) also demonstrated in Mumbai and sought contributions from the public to save the ship.
However, as maintenance costs mounted, the central government, then under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), decided to dismantle the ship.
Vikrant was sold to a shipbreaker for Rs 60 crore after an online auction in 2014 and scrapped in November that year. The sale was contested in the Supreme Court, which dismissed the petition.
The case against Somaiya
While the twists and turns in the case coincide with the change in power at the state level, Bhosale says he is not politically inclined.
“I am a soldier and my only intention behind this case was service to the nation. I am not politically inclined. My only duty is to fight for justice; let us see if we get it or not,” said Bhosale, who served in the Army from 1990-1997.
“Since the news of its decommissioning, there was some news or the other about INS Vikrant. And I knew about this drive to save INS Vikrant only through the news and hearsay.”
Bhosale says he wasn’t alone in donating to the campaign to save Vikrant. Money was collected from various parts of the city and the proceeds were to be given to the governor of Maharashtra.
But in a Right to Information (RTI) reply to a man named Dhirendra Upadhyay, the governor’s office said no such money had been deposited with the office of the Maharashtra governor.
And the investigating officer, Vinay Ghorpade, said the drive to raise funds was limited to Churchgate and only lasted about an hour.
He said in his closure report it wasn’t possible to collect Rs 57 crore in such a short period and the “accused has not misappropriated any amount”.
Only, additional chief judicial magistrate Shinde wasn’t convinced. His 8 August order said the investigation showed that people had donated money and the accused had “collected the money in the said drive”.
“The investigating officer has not taken any pain to record statements of the witnesses, from other places, who have also alleged to have made contribution in the said drive and thus further investigation is necessary in this case,” the court said.
Until a couple of years ago, Somaiya was known to spend most of his time as his party’s backroom investigator—gathering official filings, making RTI requests and getting information with which he would target his political opponents.
However, of late, Somaiya has been largely silent after several of his targets are now associated either directly with the BJP or with the Mahayuti alliance, which comprises the BJP, the Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP.
So, when the Mumbai magistrate court asked the EOW to re-investigate the case against Somaiya, his political opponents saw it as payback time.
“Satyameva jayate (Truth alone prevails),” Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut said in a post sharing a newspaper clipping about the court’s ruling on the social media platform X.
सत्यमेव जयते!
हिसाब तो देना ही पडेगा!! pic.twitter.com/zIkUknRTpM
— Sanjay Raut (@rautsanjay61) August 13, 2024
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)