Author: Express news service
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: May 29, 2009
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/farewell-gift-to-nationinlaw...-pm-sonia-guilty-says-bjp/452443/0
Describing the withdrawal of the Interpol
Red Corner Notice by the CBI against Italian businessman and Bofors suspect
Ottavio Quattrocchi as "the last nail in the coffin of the judicial process
in the Bofors scandal", NDA prime ministerial candidate L K Advani said
he considered both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia
Gandhi "guilty" and promised to "examine the Quattrocchi issue
if voted to power".
Reacting to The Indian Express report on the
CBI decision not to proceed against Quattrocchi, Advani told reporters in
Ahmedabad that Singh and Gandhi were "directly responsible" for
this and other "shameful acts of misuse of government institutions".
He said voters would punish the Congress the same way as they did in 1989
when the Bofors issue swept Rajiv Gandhi out of power.
Advani said the Quattrocchi affair showed
that the UPA was "not confident of returning to power" and, therefore,
"could not put on hold such an important decision" until the next
government took over. He said "all this amounts to a conspiracy to bury
the truth about Bofors".
"I consider both the Prime Minister and
Congress president guilty (of the withdrawal of the RCN)... His (PM's) silence
over the past five years on the systematic misuse of the CBI and the Law Ministry
confirms his guilt. It also confirms my assessment that he is a weak and unworthy
Prime Minister who had devalued his high office by making it subservient to
the diktats of 10 Janpath," Advani said.
He questioned how the Congress could be trusted
on its promise of bringing back black money to India, alleging that kickbacks
in the Bofors scandal too were deposited in secret Swiss accounts.
In New Delhi, the BJP promised to investigate
the "CBI collusion with its political masters" if voted to power.
"It is time the CBI is made accountable,"
BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley told reporters, saying the agency "deserves
to be investigated" to restore its credibility.
He said the BJP would appoint a commission
headed by a Supreme Court judge to investigate "the collusion of the
CBI with the accused in several sensitive cases and suggest steps to institutionalise
the independence of the CBI."
Jaitley said the RCN had been withdrawn by
the CBI "at the behest of the political establishment and at the cost
of its own credibility." He called it a "farewell gift to the nation-in-law"
by the UPA government. The timing, he said, suggested that the UPA was convinced
it would lose power. "Like most despotic regimes, it is obliging its
friends in the last days of office," he said.
The CBI, Jaitley said, had mastered "the
art of self-goals" and "sabotage in criminal cases involving friends
of the ruling establishment".
On Quattrocchi being let off, he said it was
evident from the CBI "delay in lodging an FIR, delay in sending letters
rogatary, not appealing against an erroneous judgment of the Delhi HC in 2004,
collusion in defreezing his bank account in London, making statements in London
to the Crown Prosecutor that there was no case against him, allowing the statements
to be used against itself in the arrest case in South America and, finally,
the withdrawal of the Red Corner Notice".
