For the second day in a row, the BJP on Thursday continued its attack on the Congress for calling the Enforcement Directorate chargesheet against Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi an act of vendetta. Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri advised Congress workers to stage protests against their own leaders for “misappropriating” public property in an “open-and-shut case” of corruption and swindle and not the ED. The party also attacked Robert Vadra for allegedly profiting from “land grab” when the Congress was in power in Haryana and at the Centre.
“This is an open-and-shut case of fraud, corruption and money laundering. The Congress party has used their lawyers to somehow delay and derail the case,” Puri said in a press conference at the BJP headquarters. He said that the case started in 2012-13 when the BJP was not in power, and wondered how public property worth Rs 2,000 crore could be acquired paying just Rs 50 crore. He said that the metropolitan magistrate hearing the case in 2014 had said that “it appears the YIL (Young Indian Ltd.) was created as a sham or a cloak to convert public money to personal use”.
Noting that the YIL was incorporated as a charity, it performed no philanthropic activity on Plot no 5-A, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, which was originally allotted at concessional rates in 1963 for National Herald for a press that shut down in 2008. “When the premises were inspected in 2016, there was no printing press, the ground and first floors were rented out to the Passport Office, and the second and third floors were rented out to Tata Consultancy Services for massive amounts of rent,” Puri said, charging that “they collected rent using a charity”.
On the same day, BJP spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia defended the Centre’s action against Vadra over alleged ‘land grab’, asserting that this was part of the government’s war against corruption. “They think that just because they have a Gandhi surname, they are above the law of the country… But there is no VIP. If you engage in corruption, the law will reach you.”
When the Centre and Haryana both had Congress governments, Bhatia said, there was a deal that offered a 700% profit in four months. “Vadra’s company Skylight Hospitality purchased a 3.5-acre land for Rs 7.5 crore…and soon sold it for Rs 58 crore,” he said.
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