A third audio tape has a conversation said to be among the three emissaries: Hyderabad hotelier Nanda Kumar and two swamys.
Accused in Cash for MLA row (from left) Nanda Kumar of Hyderabad, Simhayaji Swamy of Tirupati, and Ramachandra Bharathi, alias Satish Sharma, a resident of Faridabad near Delhi. (Supplied)
The ruling TRS in Telangana on Friday, 28 October, released two audio clips, purportedly of conversations between TRS MLA Pilot Rohit Reddy and the three BJP emissaries allegedly sent to poach party MLAs.
The tapes, if authentic, would substantiate the TRS charge that the BJP was offering power, pelf and protection to the MLAs if they ditched the pink party and joined the saffron party ahead of the 3 November Munugode bypoll.
South First cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the tapes, or even whether the voices are those of the three emissaries, all of whom were arrested from Rohit Reddy’s farmhouse on Wednesday night and charged under various sections of the IPC.
Transcripts of the two audio tapes are available here.
The audio clips, released on the TRS party Twitter handle and aired on the party channel TNews, have the participants discussing the finer details of engineering the defection of MLAs from the TRS to the BJP and mention how the matter would be decided by BJP’s National General Secretary (Organisation) BL Sathosh and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.
T News identified the speakers in the first two audio clips as TRS MLA Pilot Rohit Reddy, Swami Ramachandra Bharathi alias Satish Chandra of Delhi, and Hyderabad hotelier Nanda Kumar.
At a time the state BJP leaders are vehemently declaring that they had nothing to do with any operation to poach TRS MLAs, the audio suggests they might be telling the truth.
In the second audio tape, Nanda Kumar is heard telling Bharathi that the state unit of the BJP was being bypassed in setting in motion the operation, and that the Centre was directly handling the issue.
During the conversation, Bharathi is heard mentioning the number 100, implying ₹100 crore to Rohit Reddy. He is heard saying that making the payment was not a problem at all for the BJP, and that he should switch sides before the Munugode by-election.
In the clip, Bharati refers to BL Santosh discussing the issue with Amit Shah and the latter telling him that if it was for just one or three MLAs, there was no need to go all the way to Hyderabad as they could be asked to come to Delhi instead.
In the process, he spilt the beans that a similar operation was on in Delhi — where the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is in power —and that 43 MLAs were ready to jump ship.
Swami emphatically says that once Rohit Reddy joins the BJP, within one month, KCR would dissolve the “government” and it would collapse. He also refers to one Tushar and tells Nanda Kumar that he would bring him along with him when they meet in Hyderabad, and before taking the MLAs to Santosh.
In the first part, the gist of the conversion between the three persons purportedly representing BJP and Rohit Reddy is that the saffron party has a well-laid-out plan to land as many MLAs as possible to set off a kind of domino effect.
Though there was a mention of No 1 and No 2 in the clip, they were not identified, and there is only a reference to one Santosh as the organising secretary of the BJP.
Though the voice attributed to Ramachandra Bharati carefully avoided mentioning the party he was representing, at one point in the first audio tape, he mentioned it as BJP and there was also a mention of RSS in some other context.
Bharathi also mentioned 3 November, and said that they wanted qualified people in their organisation before the date as they want it to serve a particular purpose, implying that the defections should take place before that date to brighten the prospects of the BJP in the Munugode by-election.
The speakers were careful about referring to those who wanted to switch sides. There was no mention of money anywhere in the first audio clip, but there were words like “bulk” that suggested money. There was a clear mention of protection from the ED, Income Tax, besides providing them security.
The voice attributed to Rohit Reddy appeared tense while speaking, and at one point, he requested the one at the other end of the line to keep the entire conversation very confidential and even said that if the contents got leaked he would be “screwed” as everyone knows what kind of person the (Telangana) chief minister was.
It looked as though the conversation took place much before the appointed day of 26 October, when Ramachandra Bharati, Nanda Kumar, and a swamy from Tirupati Simha Yajulu met the four legislators at Rohit Reddy’s farmhouse at Aziznagar in Moinabad police station limits.
In the clip, Bharathi’s voice was heard asking Rohit Reddy to spell out the names of the other MLAs, but
he declined, saying he could not at that time.
In the first tape, Bharathi repeatedly mentioned the name of one Santosh, without saying who it was. It is only in the second tape that he identifies him as the BJP general secretary. He also referred to two people in the organisation as No 1 and No 2 and said that they would go to Santosh’s place whenever they wanted to have a meeting with him.
He also assured Rohit Reddy not to worry as he had experience in handling assignments of this nature and referred to an operation in West Bengal.
From the conversation, it becomes clear that Rohit Reddy had previously spoken to Nanda Kumar who then spoke to Bharati. In the clip, Rohit Reddy promises to reveal the names of the other MLAs when they meet No 2.
(This story has been updated. There were two, not three, audio clips)
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