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‘Half-baked information to Supreme Court’: Congress on Rafale verdict
Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said the Congress did not believe that the Supreme Court was the right forum to decide if there should be a probe into the Rafale deal
Launching a fresh offensive against the NDA government over the Rafale deal, the Congress on Friday reiterated its demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe on the aircraft deal. The ruling BJP has not agreed to any such House probe so far.
After the Supreme Court effectively said that there is no wrongdoing in the deal, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala claimed that the apex court has merely validated what the Opposition party has been saying that the courts are not the forum to decide the issue.
There have previously been JPC probes on several issues including the stock market scam of 1992, the 2G spectrum allocation scam in the late 2000s, and on the alleged presence of pesticides in cold drinks. Under this mechanism, members of both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha form a panel to probe a specific issue. The report of such panels often result in amendments in law or rules.
After the JPC report on the stock market scam, for instance, the government amended the Sebi Act to give more teeth to the market watchdog.
“I said that Article 136 and Article 32 are not the forum to decide the issue, the pricing, the process, the sovereign guarantee and the corruption in the Rafale contract. The only medium, the only forum is a Joint Parliamentary Committee which should probe the entire corruption in the Rafale deal, find out and decide who are the persons who are accused and then the process of law must be set in motion,” Surjewala said. His reference is to two sections of the constitution that detail the powers and the responsibility of the apex court.
“We went to Parliament and even today we are in Parliament demanding a JPC. We went to CAG (the Comptroller and Auditor General, the government’s auditor) , which is the other forum where this matter can be examined and if Government has nothing to hide, if (Prime Minister) Modi and his government has committed no corruption, then I challenge him to submit to a JPC probe.”
Bolstered by the Supreme Court verdict on the Rafale deal, the government on Friday ruled out the possibility of a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe into the contract and mounted a strident counter-attack on the Congress, saying the “deaf” will never hear an answer.
At a joint press conference with defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman, finance minister Arun Jaitley called the allegations relating to Rafale jet deal as “fiction writing” that compromised national security, while adding that falsehood is bound to fall apart and “disrupters” have lost on all counts.
“Falsehood is bound to fall apart. Indeed it has. Falsehood always has short life. In this case it was a few months. And falsehood always lowers the credibility of its creator,” Arun Jaitley said.
