New Delhi: The Congress party on Saturday came down heavily on the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government over the controversial Rafale deal, saying that its leaders’ “obfuscation, subterfuge and smokescreens won’t cover the tracks of corruption.”
“Faced with ‘Truth’ on the Rafale scam, Prime Minister Modi’s court jesters and a pack of liars are deeply unnerved, agitated and frustrated. Abuse and subterfuge is the only weapon left in the armoury of ‘House of Lies’,” said Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala.
Surjewala’s comments come after Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad earlier in the day had said that it was wrong to expect a more mature statement from Gandhi when his “entire family is arraigned for scams like the National Herald scam and the Bofors scandal.”
Talking about the same, Surjewala said, “A peeved and flummoxed Law Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, who has been a counsel for Anil Ambani in the past, dished out a cacophony of slander and calumny to vent out his frustration and has tied himself in knots in verbal diarrhea of lies.”
“Law Minister suggested that Congress-UPA purchased Rafale aircrafts without weapons, while Prime Minister Modi’s government purchased the aircrafts with weapons. This is utterly false. Law Minister is challenging the credibility, competence and integrity of Indian Air Force. This itself is anti-national,” Surjewala said.
He further added that “not a single aircraft more will be ‘Made in India.'”
“Congress-UPA would have manufactured 108 aircrafts in India through ‘Transfer of Technology’. This was shelved by the Prime Minister to help his friends,” Surjewala said.
The Rafale jets were chosen during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) tenure in 2012.
Initially, India had planned to buy 18 off-the-shelf jets from France, with 108 others to be assembled in the country by the state-run aerospace and Defence company HAL.
The Centre led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi scrapped the UPA’s plan in 2015 and announced that it would buy 36 “ready-to-fly” Rafale jets instead of seeking a technology transfer from France’s Dassault Aviation and making the aircraft in India.
[source_without_link]ANI[/source_without_link]