Former Chief Minister of Bihar Lalu Prasad Yadav has been awarded five-year incarceration on Monday - February 21 by a CBI court in Ranchi, Jharkhand in connection to the fodder scam. By sentencing five-year imprisonment, the special CBI court has also imposed a fine of Rs 60 lakh. The sentence had quickly drawn huge national attention and has come a week after the former Chief Minister was found guilty by the court. 

Lalu Prasad Yadav was pronounced guilty in the fifth fodder scam, which was to the tune of Rs 139.35 crore, on February 15. The quantum of punishment was announced on Monday and Lalu Prasad Yadav had appeared in the court virtually. Along with him, the court had convicted 73 others including former MP Jagadish Sharma and Public Accounts Committee President Dhruv Bhagat in the case. On the other hand, the court had acquitted 24 others for the lack of evidence. 

It must be noted that 75-year-old Yadav has already been in judicial custody and is admitted to the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences due to his poor health conditions. He has been serving a sentence of 27.5 years of imprisonment in four cases related to the Rs 950 crore fodder scam and he has now been pronounced guilty in the fifth case. In this fifth case, the FIR was filed in the Doranda police station in Ranchi in 1996 and the case was later taken over by the CBI. 

According to reports, a total of 170 were accused of corruption in this case and of these 170, 55 had died, seven had become witnesses, two had confessed the crime, and six accused are still at large. Around 575 people were testified by the prosecution during the trial in the CBI court. The court had also noted the arguments by 35 defendants. 

The case involves the illegal withdrawal of Rs 139.5 crore from the Doranda treasury. After the sentence, the three-time Chief Minister of Bihar took to Twitter and wrote in Hindi, "I fight those who create a divide. They can't defeat us so they try to trap us in conspiracies. I have neither been afraid nor bent before anyone. I will keep fighting. The coward will never understand the struggles of a fighter." 

The Himalayan scam of Rs 950 crore involved corruption in which the funds that were reserved for animal fodder were looted from multiple government treasuries across Bihar, while Lalu Prasad Yadav was the Finance Minister of Bihar. The Animal Husbandry Department had allegedly issued fake bills to facilitate the scam. Yadav was accused of having a major involvement in the scam, which had devasted his image across and beyond the borders. 

The scam had happened from 1990 to 1996 and the documents submitted by the department regarding the transportation were found to be fake over the course of the investigation. The CBI had produced documents in the court in which it had claimed that Lalu Prasad Yadav knew about the corruption. Reacting to the prison sentence that was pronounced on Monday, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had disassociated himself from the case and said, "When the case was filed, they came to me also. Some of those who did file cases are with him (Yadav) today."