Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday urged Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to expunge the allegedly derogatory remarks made about him by Bharatiya Janata Party MPs in the Lower House of Parliament.
“Our aim is that the House should function and there should be discussion in the House,” the leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha told reporters after meeting Birla. “They can say whatever they want about me, but we want that there should be discussion in the House.”
Gandhi added that the speaker had assured him he would examine the matter.
The Congress leader did not specify which remarks he was seeking to get expunged.
However, since the beginning of the Winter Session of Parliament, members of the BJP have repeatedly accused top Congress leadership of colluding with billionaire philanthropist George Soros to “destabilise” India.
The BJP first raised the allegations on December 6, when party leaders Sambit Patra and K Laxman called Gandhi a “traitor” in a press conference.
Citing an investigation by the French investigative journalism outlet Mediapart into the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, they said: “OCCRP and Rahul Gandhi are two bodies and one soul. Rahul Gandhi does not want India to move ahead. He does not want the Indian Parliament to function.”
Mediapart recently reported that OCCRP had “accepted several US government donations that it is obliged to spend on investigations into certain countries that Washington considers to be a priority matter”. These included Russia, Venezuela, Malta, Cyprus and the operations of Mexican drug cartels. There was no mention of India in any of the reports.
On Sunday, the French outlet’s publisher and director Carine Fouteau on Sunday accused the BJP of distorting its reporting to promote a “conspiracy theory”.
The BJP had “wrongly exploited Mediapart’s article in order to spread fake news that we never published”, The Wire quoted Fouteau as saying.
Despite this, BJP MPs have continued to demand discussion on the matter in Parliament.
Congress MP Manickam Tagore had written to Birla on December 6 seeking action against Patra for using allegedly “highly slanderous language” against Gandhi at the press conference.
On Wednesday, Gandhi said that BJP MPs were trying to divert the attention of the people by making allegations against him. “But we want to run the House,” he said.
The leader of Opposition said that it had been decided that there would be a debate on the Constitution on December 13. “This discussion should take place,” he asserted.
He alleged that the Narendra Modi government does not want a discussion in the House about allegations of financial wrongdoing against Adani Group founder Gautam Adani. “They want to divert the issue, but we will keep raising this issue,” Gandhi said.
On November 20, Gautam Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani and six others were indicted in New York in a case about the billionaire industrialist’s solar projects in India. The Adani Group, however, denied the allegations and called them baseless.
A day later, Gandhi demanded Adani’s arrest, claiming that it was now “clear and established” in the United States that the billionaire had broken both American and Indian laws.
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