Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of taking kickbacks of Rs. 65 crore from two corporate groups, Sahara and Birla, during his tenure as Chief Minister of Gujarat.
Mr. Gandhi asked him to face an independent probe into the allegations.
Addressing a massive rally in Mehsana, Mr. Modi’s native district and the BJP bastion, Mr. Gandhi alleged that the Income Tax authorities had recovered diaries from the two groups in which details of the ‘kickbacks’ were mentioned but no probe had been initiated.
‘Note ban meant to help corporates’
“It is on the records of the Income Tax Department that Mr. Modi received money from the Sahara Group nine times in six months in 2013-14,” he said. He cited dates, allegedly mentioned in the diaries, on which Mr. Modi was paid “bribes” by senior employees of the corporate groups. As per the entries in the diaries, on October 30, 2013, Rs. 2.5 crore was given to him; on November 12, Rs. 5 crore; on November 27, Rs. 2.5 crore; and on November 29, another Rs. 5 crore.
“Narendra Modi ji , tell us whether this allegation is true or not, order an independent investigation into the entries in the diaries and come clean. You have made the entire country stand in queues for days. Now speak the truth,” Mr. Gandhi said.
During his 40-minute speech, he slammed Mr. Modi over demonetisation. He termed the government’s move a “firebomb on the poor and farmers”. “The demonetisation is meant to take away money from the poor and hand it over to 50 big industrialists who are already the largest defaulters of the banks,” he said.
Hours after Mr. Gandhi’s attack on the Prime Minister drew a sharp reaction from Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Congress said in New Delhi that Mr. Modi should come clean on whether he accepted the money from the corporate houses or not.
Party communication department head Randeep Surjewala said there must be an “impartial, credible inquiry” against the Prime Minister, just as it would have happened in case some other name had cropped up in a mail from a senior corporate executive or in a company’s Excel sheet entries.
