New Delhi, March 20: The former Deputy Prime Minister and working chairman of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), L.K. Advani, on Saturday questioned the logic of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his statement on the ‘cash-for-votes’ cable published accessed through WikiLeaks.
In his latest blog entry, ‘PM’s indefensible defence,’ Mr. Advani referred to the statement of Dr. Singh in Parliament that in the 2009 general election, people rejected the Opposition charges on the cash-for-votes. “Since when has an election victory come to be regarded as an exoneration of crimes committed by the victor before his election?” Mr. Advani sought to know.
Bofors impact
The BJP leader said that in the 1989 general election fought on the issue of the Bofors gun scandal, the majority of the Congress led by Rajiv Gandhi was down from 415 to 197 seats.
“After this new thesis put forth by Dr. Manmohan Singh to claim that the people of India had endorsed his brazen bribery shenanigans, does he realise that by the same logic the 1989 verdict of the Lok Sabha would mean that the Indian electorate had pronounced Rajiv Gandhi guilty in the Bofors scandal?”
Mr. Advani described Dr. Singh’s statement as a frantic and futile effort to whitewash the biggest scandal in independent India and it was effectively countered by Leaders of Opposition in the two Houses Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley.
The senior BJP leader said two news reports on WikiLeaks published by The Hindu in a single week gravely undermined Dr. Singh’s position in national politics.
Mr. Advani recalled the first report published on March 15 about the assessment of the then National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan, at his meeting with U.S. Ambassador Timothy Roemer, that the Prime Minister was isolated within the government on the question of engaging with Pakistan.
“I believe that if on issues related with terrorism, like Pakistan and J&K, evaluation were to be made of Indian public opinion, Dr. Manmohan Singh would be discovered isolated not only in his own government but even among the people. But what has inflicted a really irreparable sledge-hammer blow to his government’s image and even to its legitimacy is the second Hindu report which has appeared just two days later on March 17. Little wonder several newspapers have been referring to this report as a ‘Wikibomb for the UPA,’” Mr. Advani wrote in his blog.
“No contradiction”
Meanwhile, reacting to reports in The Hindu on cables on the meetings between U.S. officials and BJP leaders on the nuclear deal, party spokesperson Prakash Javadekar maintained that there was “no contradiction” in the party stand.
“We have made our position clear in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha and through press statements that we value strategic relations with the U.S. and that all sources of energy should be tapped,” he said.
The party spokesperson said that when the government brought the Nuclear Liability Bill, his party raised certain objections and the government had to make 16 amendments to the Bill at its insistence. “We keep the national interest foremost…there is no doublespeak,” Mr. Javadekar said.
—Agencies