After BJP’s Vadra assault, Cong attacks PM

18/10/2017

NEW DELHI, Oct 18: The Congress hit back at the BJP today over allegations of Robert Vadra's links with a fugitive arms dealer, accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of making 100 tours within India and abroad on private chartered planes as Gujarat chief minister and asking who paid for them.
Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi also accused the BJP of "witch-hunt and vendetta" against party chief Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law.
Singhvi, with Gujarat Congress leader Arjun Modhwadia by his side, released a purported list of Modi's visits abroad and within the country from 2003 to 2007 when he was the chief minister and asked who funded those.
The two leaders claimed neither the government nor the BJP paid to private players owning the chartered planes used by Modi.
The details of Modi's visits were made available in response to an RTI query, they said, adding Rs 16.56 crore was spent on those trips, including Rs 3 crore on visits abroad.
The Congress' allegations against Modi came in response to yesterday's attack by the BJP on Vadra and the Congress leadership following a report on TV channel Times Now which claimed fugitive arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari paid for plane tickets of Sonia's son-in-law.
Based on the media report, the BJP yesterday fielded Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who mounted a fierce assault on the Congress leadership over alleged "links" that Vadra had with Bhandari. The report had claimed Bhandari booked tickets for Vadra's overseas visit in 2012.
"We are raising a question on who spent this Rs 16.5 crore. We want to know why a private party spends for a person in a constitutional position. What is the motive?" Singhvi said.
Charging the BJP with indulging in "vendetta politics", Singhvi asked Modi or the BJP to come out with answers to their questions for the "sake of propriety".
"These trips are clearly trips by a constitutional functionary, position holder. They are provided for by private persons...and we do not have any account. We must have accountability first.
"We are talking of constitutional propriety as somebody was trying to teach us lessons on constitutional propriety yesterday. It is worse than the pot calling the kettle black," he said.
Singhvi also accused the Centra and the BJP-ruled Haryana and Rajasthan governments of engaging in a "witch hunt" against Vadra.
"In the last 41 months, the central government and the governments of Haryana and Rajasthan have been indulging in a witch hunt against Vadra. For the last 41 months, they have kept the pot boiling but have not found any proof," Singhvi said.
"No conclusion, but it is lovely to keep the pot boiling, either when the elections are round the corner or when a beta bachao andolan is in full speed, to divert, to digress, to confuse and to confound," Singhvi said, in an obvious reference to a report by a news portal that the turnover of a company of BJP chief Amit Shah's son Jay rose sharply after the party came to power at the Centre.
He termed as "baseless" the charges levelled against Vadra by Sitharaman based on the media report, which Vadra's lawyer has already denied.
Singhvi accused some in media of "selective" reporting and asked them to introspect.
However, Union minister Smriti Irani today sought to put the Congress in the dock on the Bofors issue, citing claims of a private investigator involved in its probe, and asked it to come clean on the involvement of its leaders in the alleged scam.
Targeting the opposition party, she told reporters that its leaders, including its chief Sonia Gandhi, have been shown to be too eager to grab undue benefits whether it is a matter of an air ticket upgrade or a scam like the Bofors deal.
Quoting from private detective Michael Hershman's interviews to some media houses, she said he was asked by then Finance Minister V P Singh to look into the Bofors deal but was later offered bribe and then given death threat when he stumbled on the evidence of bribe.
The then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi shifted Singh to the defence ministry while Hershman was also asked to implicate Singh, she said.
Quoting him, she said the owner of a Pakistani-run Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which had been allegedly involved in money laundering and other financial crimes, or his representative met Rajiv Gandhi with a large suitcase.
Following this, the bank, which was shut after a CBI raid in connection with the Bofors deal, was allowed to open and its detained officials were released, she said.
"Who were offering bribe? Why did a Congress leader (Rajiv Gandhi) choose to silence his own minister (Singh)?
"For too long the Congress has kept conveniently quiet.
It is time that it answers as to what was the role of Congress leaders then and now," she asked, adding that many of them are still around.
The Congress has had a tendency to either bribe or give death threats to people looking into dubious deals involving its leaders, she alleged.
Hershman's interviews have brought to life the "sordid saga" of Bofors.
Irani parried queries asked by the Congress at a press conference in which it questioned then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's, now prime minister, 100 trips in private chartered flights.
She said the Congress was trying to prove its leaders involved in the Bofors case and Robert Vadra, Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law involved in controversial land deals, innocent. Its leader have not responded to Hershman's claims or fresh charges against Vadra, she said.
To a question, the information and broadcasting minister said the Congress should have filed a defamation suit against Hershman if it believed he was wrong as she noted that Jay Shah, the son of BJP chief Amit Shah, had filed a Rs 100-crore suit against a news portal over a story on his business.
In the press conference, BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra cited the BJP's victory in 1,311 seats against 312 of the Congress in Maharashtra local body polls to claim that people have rejected the opposition's narrative against the Modi government.
"For the BJP, the party is family and for the Congress, the family is party," he said, in a dig at the Gandhi family.

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