Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh government on Tuesday (October 31) decided to take back some government land from jailed Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan’s Jauhar Trust. The decision was taken at Yogi Adityanath-chaired Cabinet meeting at Lok Bhavan in Lucknow at 11 am. Over a dozen proposals were discussed at the meeting which also included the issue of withdrawing the allotted land to Jauhar Trust by the then Samajwadi Party government.
The land of Secondary Education Department was allotted to Azam Khan's Johat Trust at a rent of Rs 100 annually during the then SP government. BJP MLA Akash Saxena had alleged that during the tenure of SP, Azam had got the land of Murtaza Vidyalaya transferred in the name of Johar Trust. The office of Samajwadi Party was built on the land.
Earlier last month, the Income Tax (IT) Department had raided the premises of Azam Khan. The raid was conducted in connection with the Al Jauhar Trust matter. The raids were conducted in several other districts of the state, including Rampur, Lucknow, Saharanpur, Ghaziabad, and Saharanpur.
Azam Khan's accusation on govt
In January 2023, Khan had made a statement in which he called himself the "messiah of the poor" and accused the government of harassing them. Khan, who had reached Bandra Court to appear in the defamation case, told the media that he was innocent and that the government was "deliberately implicating him."
"Everything is being done to trouble me, I have not committed any crime. Till now the capitalists have built universities. I am a poor man, I made a university which does not charge fees for orphans," Khan had said.
