Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday attacked Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh over his family’s alleged foreign accounts and also took a dig at the Aam Aadmi Party, which he said was more interested in creating controversies than running the Delhi government.
The BJP leader said under the Modi government the country was firmly moving ahead on the path of development and claimed that the Congress was constantly “shrinking” across the country.
With Mr. Amarinder accusing him of using the Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax department to target him and his family, Mr. Jaitley hit back saying that the facts spoke otherwise.
“I recall when there was Congress government in Punjab in 2002 led by Capt. Amarinder Singh, he used to cook up stories about the Badal family, claiming they have land in Australia, petrol pump in America, besides levelling other charges. He failed to prove the allegations which he levelled, but we have found accounts of Capt. Sahib’s family,” Mr. Jaitley said at the ‘Vikas Parv’ rally in Bathinda, which was organised to mark the completion of NDA government’s two years in office.
Mr. Jaitley, who lost the 2014 Lok Sabha polls from Amritsar to the Congress leader, rubbished Mr. Amarinder’s claim that his family had been wrongly framed.
“The information about [bank] accounts in Switzerland was given to the Indian government was given for the first time by the French authorities. This information was provided by France in 2011, when UPA was in power whereas Modi ji’s government came to power in 2014. Under the Congress government, when current President [Pranab Mukherjee] was the Finance Minister, the information about Capt’s family account came out,” Mr. Jaitley noted.
The Minister, who has been accused by Mr. Amarinder of trying to settle “political scores” since the Amritsar defeat, said, “We never advised you to open accounts in foreign countries.” The UPA government, he added, went slow in the case. “When they learnt that this information can hurt the Congress, the previous government slowed down on this issue, even though they wrote one or two letters. But we have procured all the documents pertaining to the incomplete file.”
Mr. Jaitley wondered why the name of the Congress leader’s family had cropped up. “ They could have said that the accounts are of Akali Dal or BJP people. They didn’t take our names,” he said.
