Cong dares BJP to prove charges

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 29

Feeling the heat in the AgustaWestland case, the Congress today dared the BJP to prove charges against its top leaders in two months and stop defaming them for political reasons.

Addressing reporters today, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said, “We dare the BJP to find out who accepted bribe in the deal within a period of two months and come to us with the truth in the Monsoon Session. Stop this drama with your ministers giving media bites to defame our leaders without any basis or substance. We reject BJP’s propaganda and misinformation outright.”

Azad argued that governments (the chopper deal bribery was revealed during the previous Congress led UPA government’s rule) which are mired in corruption do not register CBI cases to investigate their own corruption.

“If the UPA or the Congress leadership had taken bribes, why would we have ordered the CBI and ED probes into the case, why would we have cancelled all dealings with the firm, why would we have initiated the process to blacklist it? We openly probed this firm and acted against it. If the BJP honestly wants to punish the accused, we dare it to tell us who took bribe in the case,” Azad said.

The Congress also slammed the BJP for revoking the decision to blacklist AgustaWerstland in August 2014, barely 40 days after putting the firm in the defence deal blacklist.

The BJP has been accusing the Congress of hurriedly initiating the process to blacklist Agusta in February 2014 just ahead of the May Lok Sabha elections and says the firm was actually blacklisted in July by the Modi-led government.