Trinamul MP Mahua Moitra has dared her detractors — BJP MP Nishikant Dubey chief among them — to prove any of their allegations against her and said she would not be deterred from raising questions over Gautam Adani’s fast-expanding business empire. “This is a hit job, they want to shut me up but I am not shutting up,” Moitra said of the allegations against her that have been taken to the Ethics Committee of the Lok Sabha.
Speaking exclusively to The Telegraph on Saturday, Moitra claimed that over the past two years, Adani had sent word to her through two Lok Sabha MPs. “Mr Adani has used two Lok Sabha MPs, and I can’t name them, to approach me to sit across the table from him and ‘sort this out’. I have refused to meet him. Last week, after this broke, I got a phone call: please sit down, sort it out, just keep quiet for six months, until the elections, everything will be fine. I refused. The issue is this is not cash for question, this is cash for no questions. I have nothing to sort out with Mr Adani,” she said.
Confident of facing the Ethics Committee, Moitra said: “I will demolish each charge. The first question is of cash. I have been an MLA before and I have an impeccable record as a public servant. You have a motivated ex-partner writing on a plain piece of paper which Nishikant Dubey forwards exclaiming I accepted two crores in cash and another 75 lakhs for an election. When a complaint of this nature is made, there absolutely has to be some documentary evidence. Where did cash come from, where was it given. If you take the so-called affidavit of (businessman) Darshan Hiranandani which they are using to back it up, there is no mention of cash.”
She also made light of other allegations of accepting expensive gifts from Hiranandani and getting him to fund the renovation of her official residence in Delhi. She accepted she had given her parliamentary portal login to Hiranandani but insisted she wasn’t wrong to do so. “All MPs do this, the login is shared, it is not some great secret that will open some threat to national security. During the training of assistants and LAMP fellows that MPs get, this login is shared. This does not give you access to the RBI vaults,” she said. “An important distinction is to be made here. As a Lok Sabha member, my email ID is separate and that I have not, I repeat not, shared with anyone. The portal ID, for all MPs, and I say this with emphasis, the practice is for secretarial and support staff and interns to use it to put up questions, etc.”
