New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government has decided to dig out a 2010 VVIP helicopter deal to attack the Congress, signalling that it had no plans to reach out to the Opposition in Parliament.
The government has decided to field newly nominated Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy to lead the attack against the Congress on the deal struck with an Anglo-Italian company during the UPA regime.
The Milan Court of Appeals - equivalent to an Indian high court - ruled on April 8 that the Rs 3,565-crore Agusta-Westland contract for the purchase of the choppers to carry VVIPs involved payoffs to Indian officials .
The court said payments through cash and wire transfers were made to the family of former air force chief S.P. Tyagi and to him as well. Based on the evidence, it ruled there was "reasonable belief that corruption took place".
Parliamentary affairs minister M. Venkaiah Naidu called a meeting on the issue in his chamber this afternoon. It was attended by BJP president Amit Shah as well as central ministers Arun Jaitley, Prakash Javadekar and Rajiv Pratap Rudy, besides Himachal Pradesh MP Anurag Thakur.
The leaders decided that the matter should be promptly raised in the Rajya Sabha under Rule 267 - which requires the suspension of scheduled business to discuss an issue - and under a similar procedure in the Lok Sabha.
Thakur and Meenakshi Lekhi, the feisty New Delhi MP, have given notices in the lower House for the controversy to be discussed.
In the upper House, the BJP hopes that Swamy, a known baiter of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, would exploit the "Italian connect" to the hilt and corner the Congress.
The BJP seems impatient to flag the chopper deal because the Milan court order has cited a letter purportedly naming Sonia and other Congress leaders. The letter was from a middleman who, according to media reports, was quoted as describing Congress president "Signora Gandhi" as the "driving force behind VIP helicopters". The name of a certain "AP" also figured in a missive exchanged between two middlemen.
However, the purported letters were produced earlier in an Italian lower court which had concluded that no corruption could be proved.
Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad set the tone for the BJP's offensive. "The Agusta-Westland deal is not an isolated case. It is of a piece with other acts of impropriety committed by UPA I and II. Corruption and lack of polity are integral to the UPA's model of governance," he said on Tuesday.
Prasad added: "When the Italian appellate court has convicted the bribe-givers, why should action not be taken against the bribe-takers in India?"
Prasad urged former defence minister A.K. Antony to "reflect on the bribe-takers in his party (the Congress)", and indicated that the Centre would soon order investigations.
"The government would expect the CBI to investigate (the criminal angle) rigorously and the ED to undertake a speedy probe into the money laundering charges," the telecom minister said.
Asked if the Centre had made up its mind to drop all efforts of engaging with the Congress to coax its support to pass key bills like those on the GST and land acquisition, a government source said: "What is all this about Opposition outreaches? Here's a case of blatant corruption."
BJP spokesperson Shrikant Sharma said "the Congress will have to pay for its sins, no matter who has done it".
"Our government has zero tolerance towards corruption because it has proved to be the biggest hurdle to national development. If there was no Agusta-Westland and 2G, there would be no droughts," Sharma said.
The BJP hopes to re-enact Bofors through Agusta-Westland and defame the Gandhis. The Bofors deal had tainted Rajiv Gandhi, who was cleared of the charges after his death.
But the party's attempts so far to tar Sonia and Rahul have proved futile because the furthest it could go was to insinuate that Sonia's son-in-law Robert Vadra was involved in questionable land deals in Haryana and Rajasthan. Even on those specific charges, the two BJP-ruled states have made no headway.
-The Telegraph Calcutta