The man claimed in a statement to police following his arrest that he had already spent the funds that had been mistakenly credited to his account in March.

A man in Bihar’s Khagaria district in India is refusing to repay Rs 5.5 lakh ($7,500) that was credited to his bank account earlier this year due to a bank error. He claims he has already spent the money.

Ranjit Das of Bakhtiyarpur village received the funds in March from the Gramin bank in Khagaria. Despite repeated notices from the Mansi police, which has jurisdiction over Bakhtiyarpur, he refused to return the money.

Following his detention, Das stated in a police statement that he was overjoyed to receive the funds, saying that he believed it came from Prime Minister Modi.

“..as Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised every one of depositing Rs 15 lakh in their bank account, I thought that it could be the first instalment of it,” Das said in his statement. 

Das was, ostensibly referring to a statement made by the Prime Minister in the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections where he claimed that he would retrieve “black money” stashed in foreign countries and deposit Rs 15-20 lakh in the accounts of the poor “for free”.

After his arrest, Das maintained that he no longer has the money in his bank account.

Deepak Kumar, Station house officer (SHO), Mansi, noted that Das was arrested as per a complaint by the manager of the Gramin bank  and that “further investigation is on.”

While Modi had said he would give Rs 15 lakh to all deserving Indians, his own right-hand man, Amit Shah, later said that this promise was nothing more than a “jumla“. “Modiji’s statement was an idiomatic expression (jumla) that was given during the Lok Sabha polls. Everybody knows that this black money doesn’t go to accounts of people,” Shah said in 2015.

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