New Delhi: A man in Bihar’s Khagaria district, who had, through a bank error, seen Rs 5.5 lakh credited to his bank account earlier this year, is refusing to return the money, claiming he has already spent it, IANS reported.Ranjit Das from the Bakhtiyarpur village had received the money from the Gramin bank in Khagaria in March of this year. However, despite being sent multiple notices from the Mansi police, under whose jurisdiction Bakhtiyarpur falls, he refused to return the money.

After his arrest, in a statement to the police, Das said that he was very happy when he received the funds, noting that he thought it was 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.

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.