The Congress is getting ready to haul up the Narendra Modi government in Parliament for the “factual bloomers” in the Supreme Court judgment on the Rafale deal that, it asserts, were caused by the Centre deliberately misrepresenting facts.
The chairman of the public accounts committee (PAC) in Parliament, Mallikarjun Kharge, said on Saturday he would discuss with other committee members the option of summoning the attorney-general for questioning over the claim in the judgment that the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report on the Rafale deal had been examined by the PAC.
“I will talk to the PAC members about summoning the AG. How can we accept this when the CAG didn’t submit its report and the PAC didn’t examine it? What is written in the judgment is a lie. Why play this game of truth and lies? Accept a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC), which will establish the truth. Let the nation know what happened,” Kharge told journalists.
The Congress rejected the government’s attempt to pass the blame by arguing that the court had misread the note submitted to it in a sealed cover.
Party spokesperson Kapil Sibal told The Telegraph: “How can it be a mistake? The affidavit speaks for itself. It is not about the PAC-CAG falsehood alone, there are several wrong claims. If (there are) so many mistakes, they are not worthy of governance.”
Saying the attorney-general must be questioned by the PAC, Sibal said: “You file an affidavit that presents baseless information, how did the top law officers allow that to go? This needs to be established, how this false claim was made, who is responsible for this? We are not attacking the court, the entire fault is of the government.”
Another spokesperson, Abhishek Singhvi, said: “Why do you first lie to the nation and then to the Supreme Court? Why did you tell the court regarding the ‘mythical’ CAG report, when did the PAC consider such a report?”
The Congress ruled out going to the Supreme Court on this issue.
Sibal said: “We were not a party to this in the court. We always maintained that the Supreme Court does not have the jurisdiction to investigate, as file notings have to be called for, the Prime Minister and officials of the defence ministry will have to be questioned. Only a Joint Parliamentary Committee can look into the whole gamut of issues.”
Questioning the BJP’s jubilation about a “clean chit”, Sibal said: “The court itself said it has limited jurisdiction and can’t examine pricing and procedures. The court has no evidence before it. When a proper investigation has not been conducted, file notings and objections not read, and who overruled the objections not examined, how can guilt be established? No mature leader will claim a clean chit, this is childish.”
The Congress pointed out some other gaps in the judgment, such as the claim that the air force chief had expressed reservations about public disclosure of the price. “No such objection was placed before the Supreme Court. No such argument was even raised by the attorney-general of India in the Supreme Court,” it said.
The judgment had also said there was an agreement between Reliance and Dassault Aviation for offset contracts in the year 2012 when Reliance Defence Ltd was incorporated only on March 28, 2015, or 13 days before Modi announced the deal on April 10, 2015, the party said.
The claim in the judgment that “there is a categorical denial from every side of the French President Francois Hollande’s statement that the Indian government forced its hands to select Reliance Defence as the offset partner” was also questioned. The Congress pointed out that Hollande had never denied or retracted his statement and even the current President, Emmanuel Macron, had not contradicted him.
Another claim in the judgment that the Congress called into question was that no specific role was envisaged for HAL in the original UPA-era deal. The party said a workshare agreement was signed on March 13, 2014, between HAL and Dassault Aviation. Even on March 25, 2015, days before the Modi deal was announced, the Dassault CEO had visited the HAL factory in the presence of the Indian Air Force chief and had confirmed the relationship between HAL and Dassault on the Rafale deal.