Jaya Jaitly's tell-all autobiography

Jaitly criticises her former Samata Party colleague, Nitish Kumar, for reneging on his promise to give Fernandes a Rajya Sabha seat

Business Standard 

The publisher of former president Jaya Jaitley’s autobiography, Life Among the Scorpions: Memoirs of a Woman in Indian Politics, promises that book is a bare-all account. The book is to be launched on Tuesday. In her autobiography, Jaitly, an associate of socialist leader and former defence minister George Fernandes, accuses the Congress of having a hand in the Tehelka sting “Operation West End”. The sting led to Fernandes’ resignation from the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led Union Cabinet. According to Rupa, the publisher, Jaitly claims in the book that Congress President wrote to then finance minister P Chidambaram, when the United Progressive Alliance was in power, to ensure that the alleged financiers of Tehelka were not treated in an “unfair” or “unjust” manner. The book contains a reproduced copy of that letter, the publisher says. Jaitly also criticises her former colleague, Nitish Kumar, for reneging on his promise to give Fernandes a Rajya Sabha seat. She claims that during the 2002 Gujarat riots, then chief minister Narendra Modi was in constant touch with Fernandes, who was then defence minister of India.

First Published: Mon, November 06 2017. 22:36 IST