Dr BR Ambedkar, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s signs forged to usurp Amreli land

RAJKOT: This one can easily go into police records as the most preposterous forgeries ever detected.
Sample this: A trunk-load of nearly 400 land documents with forged signatures of none other than some of the tallest leaders of Indian Independence - Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Dr Rajendra Prasad and Dr BR Ambedkar - were prepared to usurp nearly half of Amreli town's land.
The documents were designed so craftily so as to give them an ‘antique’ look by three conspirators, all senior citizens, two of them who have been detained..
The chief conspirator is Vali Metar, a 72-year-old man from Vapi, who colluded with his friends - Yusuf Motiwala and Vinod Bhad. Motawala and Bhad, who were given the power of attorney, have been detained.
The plot was unearthed after a Herculean eight-month-long investigation conducted by Amreli collector, superintendent of police and the team of Directorate of Forensic Sciences (DFS), Gandhinagar.
“The documents looked so antique and matched the size and shape of the ones used in the Gaekwadi era,” said Amreli SP Nirlipt Rai. The documents, all in Gujarati, were wrapped in 7-8 feet long cloth and papers.
The land parcels claimed account for nearly 45% of the area of Amreli town, said collector Ayush Oak.
Metar had been staking claim to the government land since 2008 on the grounds that the sprawling parcels were gifted to his grandfather Gora Dosa, who, he claimed, was the administrator of Amreli during Gaekwad rule. These were gifted by none other than then Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and home minister Sardar Patel after Independence and merger of princely states.
Metar claimed in the documents that his grandfather had subsequently leased out the land parcels to the state government in 1950 and 1951. He also said that if the land cannot be returned to him, he should be compensated as per the prevailing market prices as the lease of some parcels had expired in 2017, 2018, 2019.
In March last year, Oak disposed off his application as no revenue record substantiating his claim was found. Getting suspicious, Oak formed a special investing team to probe the criminality in the dispute.