 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are going to discuss what's hit the news. The Yeddi Diaries Caravan is published. Detail extracts from what seems to be the handwritten notings on a diary of Mr. Yedhya Rappa, the former Chief Minister of Karnataka. Parujay, you've been following this issue for a very long time. Partly because Gali Jaland the Reddy, who is the big moneybacks behind all of this in Karnataka, you've covered his various activities, including the illegal export of iron ore from that particular port in... Bellicari port. Bellicari port. Also the links that Gali Jaland the Reddy had with Yadu Rappa and the BJP in Karnataka. It seems that Yeddi Diaries authenticate all these claims. Yes, you know, it confirms our worst suspicions. The period when these payments were allegedly made all pertain to the period when iron ore exports had peaked because demand for iron ore had peaked in China because of the Olympic Games. But I must say the journalists from Caravan, Athira Konikara and Nelina MS have done an amazing amount of work and it's all kudos to Caravan to bring it out. And before one goes into the implications of these diaries, let's summarize briefly for the benefit of our viewers the highlights of what these, the Yeddi Diaries reveal. These have been written by Yadu Rappa's own hand, confirmed, double checked. Signed by him on every page. In Canada, in a diary where there's the state assembly, it was given to state assembly legislators in 2009. And interestingly, all these diaries have been with the income tax department from 2017 onwards. But the big payments. Yes, 1,800 crore, over 1,800 crore, the big amount of money. 1,000 crore rupees to the Central Committee of the Bharatiya Janta Party. This is 2009. That's correct. All these payments have happened in early 2009 to be precise, 18th of January, 2009. Okay, same period of time. Arun Jaitley gets 150 crore. Nitin Gadkari gets 150 crore. Rajanath Singh, 100 crore. And the two senior leaders of the BJP, LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, get 50 crore each. It has been further, the entries in the diary allege claim that Mr. Yadu Rappa paid 10 crore rupees for the marriage of Mr. Gadkari's son. And that, in over and above all these payments, a sum of 250 crore rupees was paid to unnamed judges. And 50 crore rupees paid to unnamed advocates. Now this is the big story. And Yadu Rappa was Chief Minister of Karnataka from May 2008 to July 2011. And all these diaries bear his signature. Interestingly, the Income Tax Department had shown this diary to the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in August, 2017. A year and a half ago, nothing seems to have been done about it. The Income Tax Department or an official of the Income Tax Department according to the report of Caravan had suggested there was need for further investigation by the Enforcement Directorate. But nothing has happened. Paul, the other interesting issue, of course, apart from Janadhan Reddy's, shall we say, links to Yadu Rappa and the rise of the Bharati Janta Party, there is also this added issue that how would this diary is recovered by the Income Tax Department? It seems to be from a raid on a Congress Legislature's house. And this Congress Legislature is none other than Mr. D. K. Shivakumar, supposed to be one of the richest politicians of its kind. And how this went from Mr. Yadu Rappa to the Income Tax Department and then via Mr. D. K. Shivakumar is quite an amazing story. So it's a copy of a diary. You know, we don't know who has the original, where it is. I mean, these things haven't been specified, we don't know. And this copy was in a raid of the Income Tax Department on Mr. Shivakumar's house. That raid happened in August 2017. If you will recall, Mr. Shivakumar was at that point of time in the news because he had taken a large number of legislators from Gujarat to a resort in near Bangalore at a time when there was talk that they would be bought over during the Rajasabha elections of the senior Congress leader, Amit Patel. Mr. Amit Patel's election. Thereafter, Mr. Shivakumar's residence was raided. Now, according to this caravan article, what is very, very interesting, is that there was a fight of sorts between the personal assistants of the late Anand Kumar, who was a member of parliament from Bangalore, KS Ishwarappa, a BJP leader, and Mr. Shivakumar to get hold of the diary. And apparently Mr. Anand Kumar had got hold of the diary, but because his relationship with Yadyurappa was good, nothing came out of it. But the story is actually very, very complex. Yadyurappa himself had complained to the central board of direct taxes against Shivakumar. And the Income Tax Department was part of the central board of direct taxes, which was headed at that time by Mr. Sushil Chandra, who had got in fact an extension. And Mr. Sushil Chandra currently is an election commissioner. So one possible construction, I'm not saying this is the truth, could be that the raid was also prompted by the fact that Shivakumar was sitting on this diary and it's an explosive diary. And that could be the reason for this immediate raid as well. All pure political vindetta. That here is a person who's the richest of a legislator with Hayat belonging to the Congress. And because he's so rich and he's so influential, and Karnataka is notorious for their MLA's changing sides literally at the exchange of a couple of briefcases. So this was not surprising. And what was very interesting is, but these amounts are not contained in briefcases. They're rather large. 150 crores and so on. But if you want to compare with today's situation with the 2,000 rupee notes, maybe you won't require too many large briefcases. But very interesting. Mr. Yadurappa's so-called diary meticulously notes where the money came from and where the money went. Almost like an accountant keep a diary, almost reminiscent of the Jain Hawala diaries and the Birla papers and the Sahara papers. Interestingly, among the people involved in these payments were three legislators who were found watching pornographic videos inside the legislator. They were picked up by the cameras. And very, very interestingly, the man behind it is Gali Janadhan Reddy. Behind the payments, all this, and Mr. Yadurappa acknowledges that he became Chief Minister thanks to Gali Janadhan Reddy. Because thanks to the money he got, he was able to win over legislators from the Congress and the Janta Dal secular to become the Chief Minister. Now, he acknowledges that it was Gali Janadhan Reddy who was responsible for him becoming Chief Minister in these diaries. And Gali Janadhan Reddy was the kingpin behind the iron ore scam. You know, in the documentary film I made, it's called Blood and Iron. I mean, I say in Gali Janadhan Reddy, it epitomizes the convergence of crime, business and politics. Gali Janadhan Reddy spent three years behind bars. And after he came out, he splurged on his daughter's wedding. And this was just after demonetization had been announced in November, 2016. I mean, Bangalore has never seen so much being spent on a wedding. After that, of course, Mr. Gali Janadhan Reddy had to spend another day behind bars for a small period of time. But the interesting part of the story is that when in 2011, the Lokayukta, the people's ombudsman of Karnataka and Santosh Reddy had come out with this voluminous report inditing Yedyurappa and Gali Janadhan Reddy and kicking and screaming Yedyurappa put in his papers. He was compelled, he was forced to resign and he actually spent time behind bars in October of 2011. So what happened was after that, Yedyurappa quit. He was dismissed from the party and he revived a party that had been set up by Padmanabha Prasanna Kumar. It was called the Karnataka Janatapaksh. And he remained, he was a rebel. He remained in that party until a little while before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. When Mr. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah persuaded him to return to the BJP and then you know he was the BJP's Chief Ministerial Candidate. He became a Chief Minister for a short period of time. He didn't have the majority and he's currently the leader of the opposition in Karnataka. It's an interesting issue that we have heard a lot about the Chalkidar campaign recently, but none of the Chalkidars seem to have woken up to the fact that this diary was there. Various, very senior Chalkidars' names were there and no action was being taken. Did Yedyurappa also declare himself to be a Chalkidar in this campaign of Chalkidari? I'm not so sure about it. All I can tell you is that there are all kinds of unusual details in this diary, including his alleged marriage to the BJP member of parliament, Shobha Karanlajeh, which apparently went in a secret ceremony and when he was approached, when Shobha Karanlajeh was asked this question, he said some mad people must have written this diary and then she hung up. Now, what is very interesting is that the people concerned, I already mentioned Mr. Sushil Chandra, who was heading the Central Board of Direct Taxes under which the Income Tax Department when Shivakumar's residence was raided. And it's very, very interesting that Mr. Chandra is only the second officer from the revenue service to be appointed to the election commission. But what is also very, very interesting are these little bits and pieces of information that are coming out about how the money went, who it went to. It's meticulously detailed. It's meticulously- Inflows as well as outflows, both. And I think even if these diaries meet the fate of the Jain Hawala Diary or the Birla papers and the Sahara papers, for the time being, it's severely dented. The image that the BJP is trying to project in the run-up to the elections, that they are the guardian, they are the Chokhidars in response to Rahul Gandhi accusing Mr. Modi Chokhidar Chaur Hai in the Raphael scandal. And it's all kind of, I mean, all these words are coming back, I said, in a sense, to haunt the prime minister. The same person who in the run-up to the elections would boast, Nakhaunga, Nakhanedunga, then neither will I accept any bribes, nor will I tolerate others accepting bribes. All of this is coming back today to haunt the BJP. You know, Bofors scams only 65 crores. What we have is a diary which talks about 150 crores to the finance minister, 150 crores to one of the very other senior ministers in this list, Mr. Gadkari. And the amounts are put together, 1000 crores for the BJP Central Committee. About 1800 crores. 1800 crores. And that was 10 years ago, remember. These payments were made 10 years ago. So even if we take inflation, this is many times the size of, shall we say, Bofors, which was, of course, in the 80s. But coming back, you do think that this is going to at least create a temporary embarrassment if nothing else for the BJP? The gentlemen concerned who have been named, I think they have very thick skins. I don't know what they're going to do. I'm sure Caravan won't be, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some court cases instituted against them. I think they've done their bit. What they said is that they send letters to Mr. Yadu Rappa, Mr. Arun Jaitley, Mr. Nitin Gadkari, Mr. Rajnath Singh, Mr. L. K. Adwani, Mr. Munnumar Joshi, seeking their responses. And at the time, the report was published, which is 22nd of March. These, none of the replies had come in and they're saying their reports will be updated if they respond. So they've tried to protect themselves. So it remains to be seen how the BJP reacts. Well, they just pretend it hasn't been published, ignore it altogether, and hope that the Godi media will shout and scream about something else and people will forget it. I think somewhere along the line, this could also be a bit of wishful thinking. I think we'll have to wait and watch. But probably you and I never really had doubts about all these claims that were being made about how the BJP has not been complicit in big ticket corruption. I mean, we know that in this respect, the BJP has been no different from the Congress party when they accused him. And in fact, in this I&O export scam, it was happening not just in Karnataka, but in Undivided Andhra Pradesh, which was at that point of time headed by a Congress chief minister, Y.S. Rajshekar Reddy, and his son, Jagan Reddy, is now the leader of the opposition in the divided Andhra Pradesh. I mean, they all know exactly what was going on. Jagan Reddy, too, had to spend time behind bars. I think he was behind bars for about a year, unlike Gali Janathan Reddy, who was behind bars for about three years or thereabouts. It's across the border, and iron ore mines were on both sides. And it is also true that there seems to have a business understanding between both the Reddy brothers and Rajshekar Reddy and Jagan Reddy. As the late Gauri Lankesh had pointed out to me in the interview I did with them, they would play along with the state borders, you know? The markers, those markstones, they would just move from here to there, anyway. And as the CPM leader of Andhra Pradesh had pointed out, they didn't even, you know, the so-called Hindutva Party didn't even care about a temple. When they had to sort of figure out there was a lot of iron ore behind that ancient temple, they didn't think twice about finishing it off and Mr. B. Raghavalu of the CPM pointed out that the illegal miners had no combs in demolishing an ancient temple because underneath that temple there was reserves of iron ore. Greed has no religion, and as you have showed in your film, even the waters of that place had turned red. That was the extent of how much, apart from anything else, how much even destruction it created ecologically in that place. So, hard times for Mr. Riyadh again, it looks like, and maybe hard times for some of the leaders of the BJP. Thank you very much, Paranjit, you were with us explaining to us the roots of this, not just the diary alone. Thank you for being with us. Do keep watching. News click.