Held guilty in people’s court, Raja wins case

“I will come out clean in the case which has nothing in it,” A Raja told HT when it caught up with him at KettiPalada, a village in the Nilgiris where he was campaigning to retain his Lok Sabha seat in 2014. “I have been made a scapegoat,” a confident looking Raja declared then.

He lost in the people’s court then but trial court judge OP Saini in New Delhi on Thursday acquitted the former telecom minister and all others charged in the so-called 2G scam case.

Raja, a law graduate, represented himself in the court several times, countering the claims of the prosecution. He even refused to seek bail initially saying that he had done nothing wrong and accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of “witch hunting”.

Although the 2G case hurt his party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam badly in the 2014 general elections in Tamil Nadu, Raja remained popular within the party and among the Dalit community, where he is considered a hero. DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi, whose daughter M K Kanimozhi was also an accused in the case, stuck with the Dalit poster boy of the party throughout.

Born into a poor Dalit family in Velur in the Perambulur district on October 26, 1963, Raja was active in student politics and rose quickly in the DMK hierarchy. Starting in 1996, he was elected to the Lok Sabha four times. He first entered the Lok Sabha from Perambalur constituency. He was re-elected in 1999 and later in 2004. He later shifted to Nilgiris and won in 2009. But, he lost in 2014 when the rival AIADMK swept the state.

Raja’s ministerial debut happened in the previous National Democratic Alliance government, when he was inducted as the junior minister in rural development ministry in 1996. Four years later, he was shifted to health ministry, earning praise for then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

When DMK switched sides after loss of NDA in the 2004 general elections, Raja became environment and forest minister till May 2007, when he was shifted to communication and information technology , following the resignation of Dayanidhi Maran.

It was as telecom minister that Raja was accused of criminal conspiracy in the allotment of 2G licences and the allocation of spectrum. He resigned and was arrested in February 2011. He spent 15 months in jail.

“I have done nothing wrong. There is no corruption case against me, the Income Tax people have told the court. Finance secretary told court there is no loss to exchequer. You weigh the facts, be the judge and give your verdict,” Raja told Hindustan Times in an interview in the Nilgiris in April 2014. Back then, Raja had used his picture going to jail as promotional material to tell his voters that he was an innocent person who had been jailed.

On Thursday, he said that he brought a revolution in the telecom sector and that it was not unknown in history for a person who did this to be termed a criminal.

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