From distributor of PhDs to candidate

He was apparently in Bihar all the time. He is said to have run a 12-page newspaper started from Darbhanga two years ago and was in Marukia village in Madhubani, where police say he has no relatives. Madhubani police say they didn’t know he was a wanted man either.

He joined the BJP but was not given the Jhanjharpur ticket, and decided to contest as an independent.

“We were looking for him after we got the interim bail vacated. We tracked him down with the help of Bihar police when he surfaced to contest elections,” P J P Hanaman, director-general of police, Meghalaya, said from Shillong.

Bihar additional chief electoral officer R Lakshmanan said: “There is no bar on a candidate absconding from one constituency contesting from another where he is enrolled as a voter. We will scrutinise his affidavit to see if the details are correct.”

Jha’s affidavit mentions two cases in Patna (1999 and 2002) and one in Shillong (2009). It does not mention the 2013 university fraud case. One case he has shown is in the court of a judicial magistrate in Patna where he has been charged under Sections 406, 420 and 120B of the IPC. Another is in the special judge’s court in Patna, pertaining to economic offences under sections 63, 68 and 628 of the Companies Act. The Shillong case he has mentioned is a CBI special case in the CJM’s court where he has been charged under sections 120B, 419, 420, 467 and 471 of the IPC.

In Shillong, case No 2(4) of 2013 has the Meghalaya CID police station booking him under sections 420, 406 and 466 of the IPC. Section 420 pertains to cheating, section 466 to forgery of record of courts or of public registers, etc, and section 406 to criminal breach of trust.

His university, established in 2009, awarded a record 434 PhD degrees in one academic year (2012-13) apart from registering 490 PhD scholars. In March last year, anomalies were detected and then Meghalaya governor R Mooshahary ordered that an FIR be registered.

Jha, who began as a petty supplier-contractor in a government department in Shillong, is said to have risen to an “educationalist” (as his affidavit mentions), businessman and social worker through political blessings in the hill state, which helped him set up the private university in 2009.

With Santosh Singh in Patna