A day after demanding a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probe over the alleged charges of corruption in the 2016 Rafale deal, the Congress on Sunday came out all guns blazing at the Central government’s silence over the French investigation into the Rs 59,000-crore deal for the sale of 36 Dassault-built fighter jets.
The Congress said that according to documents available now, huge amounts of money were paid to middlemen in the deal, indicating that it was a vindication of its corruption allegations against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government.
Rahul Gandhi asked in Hindi why Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government wasn’t ready for a JPC probe. The options he provided as answer were: “guilt conscience”, “friends, too, need to be protected”, “JPC doesn’t need a Rajya Sabha seat”, and “all the options are right”. This was preceded by another Hindi tweet on Saturday, in which he posted part of a proverb referring to a guilty thief.
Rahul Gandhi, in the runup to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, had made the Rafale deal a big issue but his party failed to dislodge the BJP from the government. This issue resurfaced on Saturday when reports came about the appointment of a French judge to lead a “highly sensitive” judicial probe into suspected “corruption” and “favouritism” in the jet deal with India.
On Saturday, the Congress demanded a JPC over the issue which was counter attacked by the BJP. “The way Rahul Gandhi is behaving, it will not be an exaggeration to say that he is being used as a pawn by competing companies. He has been lying right from the beginning on the issue. Probably, he is acting as an agent or some member of Gandhi family has been for a competing company,” BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra had said.
On Sunday Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera addressed a press conference and questioned the Central government’s silence over the probe in France.
“It is downright insulting to the people of India that this government and its ministers have stayed tight-lipped about this entire scandal. Why is the Minister of Defence silent?” Khera asked. “Now it is getting clearer that in the Rafale deal we have bought an item that costs Rs 570 crore at Rs 1,670 crore,” he said.
Saying that the deal was now heading towards being an “open and shut” case, the Congress spokesperson alleged that anti-corruption clauses from the deal were removed. He also accused middlemen of being involved in the proceedings. “In April, it was revealed that according to documents seized from a middleman arrested in another case by the Enforcement Directorate, crores and crores of rupees were gifted to this middle man in the Rafale deal. We don’t know what the ED did with those documents, but France is now probing them,” Khera said.
Rejecting the BJP’s argument that the people had voted for the party overwhelmingly in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections despite the Congress making the Rafale deal a poll issue, Khera said: “It is a matter of shame that this government cannot think of anything beyond elections… We are talking about what should happen now. The deal should be investigated and a JPC should be set up.”