A Rajya Sabha member of the Congress,Partap Singh Bajwa, who along with his party colleagues in Parliament, Ambika Soni and Samsher Singh Dullo, moved a privilege motion against External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj last week, says he hopes to fix accountability, as for four years, the Minister ‘deliberately misled’ Parliament on the fate of 39 Indians kidnapped by Islamic State terrorists in Iraq. Excerpts from an interview:
The BJP has accused your party of doing ‘politics of dead bodies’. What do you hope to achieve by moving the privilege motion in the Rajya Sabha?
I am saying it is not us but the government that was doing politics. We have documented how relatives of these victims had met Sushma ji either at her residence or in her office. She told them that she understood their trauma as she was a mother herself, a sister and she assured them of bringing our people back alive. On more than six occasions, citing ‘authentic sources’, the Minister went to the extent of telling Parliament that the missing Indians were being served ‘warm food’. Who are these authentic sources? Have they ever met, or had direct contact with, these Indians? We want to fix accountability and the government is answerable to its citizens.
When an eyewitness, Harjit Masih, had said they were killed years ago, on what basis was the government claiming them to be alive?
The government had called Mr. Masih’s account ‘unreliable’. Also, is it not fair for a government to wait for irrefutable evidence before declaring someone dead?
If Mr. Masih was ‘unreliable’, why was he kept in custody for six months? To your paper, he has revealed how he was taken around the country: from Delhi, Gurugram, Greater Noida to Bengaluru.
He was even indirectly told that if he spoke out, relatives of the other Indians would harm him.
Secondly, the government kept changing the goalpost. As long as Mosul was under the IS, our government thought there is no need to give any information.
When the Iraqi and American forces captured Mosul, then they said Indians are in a jail in Badush. When an Indian journalist showed that the prison the government was talking about had been destroyed months ago, they changed their stand yet again.
In any other place, the Foreign Minister would have had to resign for such a thing. I think Sushma ji too should resign.
But Ms. Swaraj gave a very detailed account of the efforts made by the government to bring back the mortal remains of our people.
Even here, she was trying to score brownie points by claiming General Saheb [General V.K. Singh, Minister of State for External Affairs] slept on the floor, deep penetration radar was used and so on.
You can check from parliamentary records that in July last year, when the Rajya Sabha debated this matter, I had volunteered to go with General Singh to Iraq to find out the ground situation and give a report to the country.
Leave alone taking me, even my Twitter handle was blocked by Sushma ji . What does this show? That the government was trying to cover up?
What and why would the government want to cover up?
That is exactly our point as well. We would like to know when did the government exactly know about these deaths. They will have to tell the country this fact. The Martyrs Foundation in Iraq that conducted the DNA tests on the remains says that they were killed, at least, a year ago.
The government has handled this issue insensitively and clumsily. Can you imagine the trauma of the relatives who learnt the news from TV?
We don’t agree with the government position that Parliament had to be informed first as this was not a policy decision but a human tragedy.
