PTI
NEW DELHI, JUNE 23
BJP MP R.K. Singh on Tuesday struck a discordant note over party leaders Sushma Swaraj and Vasundhara Raje extending help to the tainted former IPL Commissioner, Lalit Modi, saying this is “legally and morally wrong”.
Mr. Singh, a former Union Home Secretary, termed Mr. Modi a bhagoda (fugitive). The government should take all measures to bring Mr. Modi, who is currently in the U.K., back to India to face the law, he said in New Delhi.
Mr. Lalit Modi was evading judicial warrants and summons and he was clearly a fugitive and any help given to him or any meeting with him was wrong, Mr. Singh said.
He, however, did not name either Ms. Swaraj or Ms. Raje.
Asked if Mr. Lalit Modi was being “saved”, he said the departments concerned should be doing their job.
“I have given my view,” he said when asked about the BJP’s defence of both the party leaders. He would not like to name individuals, he added.
“All measures should be taken to bring him [Mr. Modi] back to India, so that he faces the law,” he said.
Mr. Singh’s strong comments in the first public criticism by a BJP MP against the help extended to Mr. Modi by Ms. Swaraj, the External Affairs Minister, and Ms. Raje, the Rajasthan Chief Minister, came even as the Congress said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was “losing political capital” by trying to protect the two leaders through his continued silence on the “indefensible issue.“
The comments came a day after Union Minister Nitin Gadkari met Ms. Raje in Jaipur and said the BJP, as well as the Central government, were strongly behind her as “accusations” against her have “no substance” and that the allegations against her were baseless and she was “legally, logically, ethically completely correct.“
Mr. Gadkari’s defence came amid the raging row over the linkages of the Chief Minister and her son Dushyant with Mr. Lalit Modi, who is facing an ED probe for alleged money laundering in an IPL tournament.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who is under attack from the Opposition for describing the deal between Ms. Raje’s son and Mr. Lalit Modi as a “commercial loan transaction,” said in the U.S. that the assessing authorities would continue to do their job in probing the matter.
The row involving Ms. Swaraj and Ms. Raje has snowballed into a major political storm for the Narendra Modi government even though the BJP has defended both the leaders.
Ms. Swaraj and Ms. Raje have been facing flak for helping Mr. Lalit Modi in procuring travel documents in the U.K., a country which he has made his home to avoid legal processes in India.
Rajasthan PCC president Sachin Pilot while targeting the Prime Minister demanded the resignation of Ms. Swaraj and Ms. Raje.
“The PM’s words — Na Khaunga Na Khane Dunga [neither will I take bribe, nor will I allow anyone to take bribe] — have come to haunt him. He is losing political capital and he and his party have been fully exposed. BJP is obstinate on this issue but we will not let the issue die down,” he told reporters in Jaipur.
