In a sharp attack on Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday accused her of ‘lying’ about the Rafale deal and demanded her resignation.
Tagging a news report where the former Chief of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) T.S. Raju claimed that the Bengaluru-based public sector undertaking could have built Rafale fighters in India if the Modi government had concluded the deal that the previous government had negotiated, Mr. Gandhi took to twitter to target Ms. Sitharaman and play on the words Raksha Mantri (Defence Minister).
“The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, TS Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didn’t have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign,” the Congress chief said.
The Congress said that after Mr. Raju’s revelation the Defence Minister has “no moral authority to continue even for a second and reiterated its demand to investigate the deal by a Joint Parliamentary Committee.”
“The [former] chief executive of HAL Shri T. Suvarna Raju has said that HAL and Dassault had actually signed the work-share contract and that it was available with the Government...he says that everything had been sorted out. It completely and absolutely demolishes the web of lies and insinuations which this government has been trying to construct,” former Union Minister Manish Tewari told reporters at a briefing.
For over six months now, the Congress has been alleging that the NDA’s Rafale deal involved ‘huge corruption’ that resulted in a loss of ₹41,000 crore to the public exchequer.
The Congress claims UPA agreed to buy 126 fighter jets, out of which 108 aircraft were to be made by HAL under transfer of technology and the price of each aircraft was fixed at ₹526 crore. However, the Modi government decided to buy only 36 Rafale jets through a fresh order and the Congress alleged that each aircraft is now coming at a cost of ₹1,670 crore.
The government formally didn’t react to the claims made by the former HAL boss but official sources called the report quoting Mr. Raju as “factually incorrect.”
“Since the work share between Dassault Aviation and HAL was never agreed upon, the statement claiming Lower Life Cycle cost is completely presumptive,” an official said.
Countering this, Mr. Tewari asked why the government had not come on record. “The government doesn’t have the courage to come out and address a press conference. So they do this surreptitiously through putting out notes,” he claimed.
Published - September 22, 2018 12:22 am IST
