Trinamul Congress MP Mahua Moitra, accused by the BJP of “accepting cash” for asking questions on the floor of the Parliament, most of which were directed against the embattled Adani Group, has informed the Lok Sabha ethics committee that she would appear before the panel at 11am on its prescribed date of November 2 only because she is being “forced” to do so, it was reliably learnt from sources.
Moitra, who left for Delhi on a late afternoon flight on Tuesday, is learned to have conveyed to the committee that she would appear to defend herself against the charges levelled against her out of her “respect for the summons”.
The developments took place on a day the unrelenting MP fired a fresh set of salvo against the Adani Group, posting a thread on her X timeline, where she accused the business behemoth of maintaining links with an Engineering-Procurement-Construction contractor of Adani Ports, despite the group previously rubbishing any such links, and misleading investors and Deloitte which later quit as auditors of the company.
Moitra had earlier written to Vinod Kumar Sonkar, the ethics committee chairperson, expressing her inability to appear on the previously set summons date of October 31 and urged for an alternative date post November 5 on account of her pre-scheduled commitments in her constituency in Krishnanagar in Bengal’s Nadia district. The committee chairman wrote back to her stating that the panel would not postpone the hearing beyond November 2.
While grudgingly accepting that deadline, Moitra accused the committee of maintaining “double standards reeking with political motives” since the privileges committee of the House, part of the ethics committee branch, has shown much more leniency with the south Delhi BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri who was summoned for appearance on October 10 for his alleged hate speech on the Parliament floor but was excused for his political campaigns in Rajasthan with no further date allotted to the accused.
Questioning the committee’s “over-zealousness” in pushing the case against her, Moitra told ABP Ananda before catching her flight to Delhi, “The committee never found time to sit even once in the last two and a half years. And suddenly they are all geared up to throw me out of the Parliament for the winter session because they know that I would create another dust-up over the Adani issue then, and ahead of the elections that would be bad news for the party.” The panel, the accused MP was learned to have written to Sonkar, was mandated in 2019 by the Lok Sabha secretariat to formulate a code of conduct for members which it has failed to draw up so far and hence, in the absence of a structured code, each case should be dealt in a fair and objective manner leaving no room for “political partisanship”.
In an interview to The Telegraph last week, Moitra maintained that the Adanis want to shut her up and that they are grossly mistaken in thinking that way.
The 14-member committee has already taken turns to hear the two complainants against Moitra, BJP MP Nishikant Dubey and lawyer Jai Anant Dehadrai, last Thursday. The latter, a former partner of Moitra with a history of acrimonious relationship with the MP, had lodged his allegations before the CBI and was quoted by Dubey in his subsequent complaint before Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla where he prayed for “immediate suspension” and initiation of a CBI probe against Moitra.
Moitra, in her latest communication to the ethics panel, reiterated her demand to cross-examine Dehadrai and her businessman friend Darshan Hiranandani (who filed a suo-motu affidavit confirming his access to Moitra’s parliamentary login and maintaining that he gave expensive gifts to the accused MP from time to time) be called to depose before the committee on grounds that neither Dehadrai provided documentary evidence in support of his allegations nor Hiranandani have an itemised list of inventories of money and gifts he allegedly gave to her, it was reliably learnt.
Moitra, it was learned, went even a step further asking the committee to respond in writing about its decision to allow or disallow her cross-examination demand of the duo.
Questioning whether it was within the committee’s jurisdiction boundary to investigate charges of alleged criminality which “jeopardizes the nation’s internal security”, a job for specialised law enforcement agencies, Moitra demanded that in the eventuality of the committee seeking and relying on reports from other central ministries in connection to the charges against her, she should also be allowed to cross-examine the departments concerned.
