Union Minister of Defence Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday said the allegations being levelled against the Rafale jet deal were just an attempt to malign the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government.
Sitharaman was referring to a joint statement released by advocate Prashant Bhushan and former Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie on Wednesday. The three alleged that the Rafale defence deal had put national security at risk, and called the deal with France a “major scandal” and “by far larger than ones that the country has had to contend with in the past”.
Sitharaman said all the allegations had already been answered in Parliament. “A recent attempt, in the House, to malign the government through baseless charges collapsed,” Sitharaman tweeted. “Today’s was yet another attempt at repeating fabricated facts.”
Sitharaman said the Inter Governmental Agreement signed in 2016 by India and France followed “due process and has been done to benefit the nation”. “Repeating these allegations ad nauseum is only an attempt to malign the government,” she said.
Union minister Arun Jaitley was the first to respond to the joint statement. He claimed there was “not a grain of truth” in the allegations and called them “unsubstantiated and “fabricated facts”.
Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy too responded to the joint statement, saying unless Bhushan, Sinha and Shourie file a public interest litigation or lodge a private complaint for prosecution, “it is just shoot and scoot”.
On July 20, Congress President Rahul Gandhi had lashed out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Sitharaman in the Lok Sabha, claiming they had not been truthful about the deal with France. He asked the government why the contract was taken away from Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and given to a businessman who is under a lot of debt, an apparent reference to Anil Ambani. The government later won a no-confidence vote brought against it by opposition members.
Randeep Singh Surjewala, who is in charge of communications for All India Congress Committee, urged Modi to respond to the questions asked by his former colleagues. “You shun the Opposition and keep mum,” he said on Wednesday.
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