A man in a Chhattisgarh town has found a weird way to appropriate government funds by conducting “fake” inter-caste marriages and had even gone to the extent of tying knots with over 300 women under fictitious names himself, the police said on Friday.
He has disproved the saying that marriages are made in heaven by arranging fake marriages of over 5,000 couples and also his own with 300 girls and women in the past two-and-half decades.
Forty seven-year-old Abdulla Khan alias Vijay Gajbhiye, resident of district headquarters town of Rajnandgaon in north Chhattisgarh, has taken the police by surprise when he made the sensational confession before the investigators after his arrest on Thursday evening. “We have busted a major inter-caste marriage racket by arresting Abdulla alias Vijay, believed to be the kingpin of the scam, at Rajnandgaon on Thursday evening. He had been running the racket for the past 25 years in different parts of the state,” police sources told this newspaper on Friday.
Interrogation of the accused by the police has revealed that Abdulla has conducted the fake inter-caste marriages to grab the incentives provided under a Central-sponsored scheme, launched to encourage marriage of people belonging to high caste with the scheduled caste communities to eradicate social evil like caste system.
The incentive, given to the beneficiaries under the scheme, has recently been doubled to `50,000.
He has been arrested under sections 420, 466 and 468 of Indian Penal Code on charges of cheating and forgery.
Ironically, he has now been deserted by all of his spouses, both fake and legal.