Agence France Presse

New Delhi, February 18:

A parliament member is being shifted from a provincial prison to India’s maximum-security one to put a stop to lavish luxuries he enjoyed behind bars in the lawless state of Bihar, jail officials said.

Pappu Yadav of Bihar’s ruling RJD party would be lodged in New Delhi’s federal Tihar prison after a court ordered an end to the privileges he enjoyed on his home turf, they said.

Portly Yadav, convicted by a Bihar court in a murder case, is known to enjoy special privileges not only because of his political profile but because he allegedly controls a private army in his stronghold district. India’s Supreme Court last Monday ordered Bihar’s state administration to send Yadav to Tihar after federal detectives said the politician was holding lavish cocktail parties and well-attended political meetings inside the prison in Bihar’s capital Patna. Jailors in Tihar, which houses scores of Islamic guerrillas from Kashmir and tribal rebels, said Yadav will be housed in Tihar’s maximum-security quarters where inmates face near isolation with only the most basic of facilities. “No such privileges there,” said a senior warden, as Yadav was being put into a train for New Delhi.