As the counting day for the 1995 Bihar Assembly elections arrived, the Congress’s Tarapur candidate Sachchidanand Singh and five of his supporters made their way to the town of Kharagpur in Munger district. They were near the village of Launa when their car came under attack from a group of assailants, who hurled a grenade.
Apart from Singh, the Congress leader’s aide Vijay Singh, and the vehicle’s driver Arvind Singh were killed in the attack on March 29, while Janata Dal leader and former MLA Tarini Singh’s son Prabhakar Singh was shot dead near the local hospital while attempting to take the victims there.
The police lodged a case (44/1995) on March 31, two days after the incident, against 27 people on the complaint of Nawada (a village near Tarapur) resident Ranbir Kumar Singh. Among the accused were sitting Tarapur MLA Shakuni Choudhary, who was seeking re-election as a Samata Party nominee, and his son Rakesh Kumar who is now known as Samrat Choudhary and is the Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar.
The case has received attention again, with Jan Suraaj founder Prashant Kishor repeatedly accusing Choudhary of falsifying his age before the court to claim he was a minor at the time of the attack and asking why the case finds no mention in his election affidavits.
The Deputy CM told The Indian Express in an interview that he was “shown as a minor” in an affidavit filed before the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s (CJM) court in Munger in April 1995, but the “court did not accept it” and the charges against him, his father, and 21 others, incliding several members of Samrat’s family, were dropped in the “pre-chargsesheet stage” as there was no “corroborative evidence”. Choudhary, who blamed his lawyer for the claim made in the affidavit, was released on bail after 89 days in prison.
The police initially charged the 27 accused under IPC sections 147, 148 and 149 (unlawful assembly), 323 and 324 (voluntarily causing hurt), 307 (attempt to murder), and 302 (murder); and Arms Act Section 27 (using arms and ammunition), and for the alleged violation of the Explosives Act.
Local journalist Sanjay Verma, who was in the area that day, said: “I saw Prabhakar Singh taking two grenade attack victims to Tarapur hospital in his car. As I made my way towards the hospital, I heard shots being fired, and later came to know that Prabhakar Singh had been shot dead.” Munger Police said the investigation showed that Prabhakar Singh, then the Janata Dal district president, and Sachchidanand, both OBC Kushwahas, were fierce political rivals, while Shakuni Choudhary dominated the politics of Tarapur as the sitting MLA.
Police records available with The Indian Express show that the case was handed over to the CID (17/1998) in 1998. On May 14, 1998, the CID filed a chargesheet against some of those named in the FIR — Ramsurat Singh, Awadhesh Singh, Sardari Singh, and Vedanand Singh — and two others whose names had not featured in the FIR, Binod Singh and Bindeshwari Choudhary. All of them were residents of villages under the Tarapur police station and were charged with the IPC sections the police had invoked, except Section 302 (murder).
“Of the 27 named accused, the Tarapur Police did not find corroborative evidence against 23 accused, including Shakuni Choudhary and Rakesh Kumar (Samrat Choudhary),” said a police officer in Munger. The investigating officer in the case was one P K Srivastava, he added. In 2003, all six chargesheeted people received a three-year jail term.
Asked about the case and its aftermath, Shashank Shekhar Singh, the nephew of Sachchidanand’s driver Arvind Singh, said, “We do not know much about the case except that the incident was the result of a political rivalry. Nothing much came out of the police investigation and some of the accused got away with minor punishment.”
What is the affidavit row?
A CID source confirmed the contents of an affidavit that Samrat Choudhary submitted to the CJM court on April 24, 1995, saying, “Rakesh Kumar (Samrat Choudhary) declared that he had appeared in the Class 10 Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) as a private (non-attending) student. The affidavit mentioned he produced his admit card issued by the Kumarsar High School showing his date of birth as January 1, 1981.”
Samrat Choudhary claimed the violence was the result of two local groups and that his family had nothing to do with it. He said he was at his home in Lakhanpur, near Tarapur, on the day of the incident.
“My father, who won on a Congress ticket in 1990, was contesting as a candidate of the newly formed Samata Party. My father had retained the seat, defeating the BJP. Since the Samata Party was emerging as a force, the Janata Dal government targeted my father and my family. It was a gang war between two local groups and our family had nothing to do with it (the murder of Sachchidanand Singh),” the Deputy CM told Express.
Choudhary said 22 people from his family, including him, were arrested on March 29 itself, while the FIR was registered two days later. “My paternal house was also partially demolished by the police soon after the incident. Our leader, George Fernandes, moved the National Human Rights Commission against this political vendetta. The NHRC later penalised the state government Rs 25,000 for damaging our house,” he said.
Asked about the affidavit claiming he was a minor, Choudhary said, “It is true that I was shown as a minor in the affidavit, but the court did not accept it. The names of 23 people, including my father and mine, were dropped in the pre-chargesheet stage for a lack of any corroborative evidence.”
As per the Deputy CM’s electoral affidavit for the coming Assembly elections, he is 56 years old: the Bihar Legislative Council website lists his date of birth as November 16, 1968. This means he would have been 26 years old at the time of the incident. Asked if the affidavit was factually incorrect, Choudhary said, “It was my lawyer who filed it. But the court did not consider it and I got bail on the same grounds as did several other accused.”
The Deputy CM said since there was no case against him, there was no reason why it should reflect in his electoral affidavits (2000, 2004, February 2005, October 2005, 2010, 2020, and 2025). “I have duly mentioned two pending cases, one related to an alleged violation of the Model Code of Conduct in Tarapur and another about an alleged disruption of law and order in Patna.”