NEW DELHI:
Congress president
Rahul Gandhi on Friday once again hit out at the Centre for alleged wrongdoing in the
Rafale aircraft deal.
Gandhi's tweet comes days after the Congress accused the Narendra Modi-led government of "compromising national interest and national security."
"Modi government is unforgivably guilty of compromising national interest and national security. Shoddy cover-up, self-defeating assertions and deliberate lies are being dished out to divert, dupe and deceive," a party communique had said.
The party used the annual report of
Dassault Aviation, the manufacturer of Rafale fighter jets, to claim that the deal inked by Prime Minister Modi caused a loss of Rs 12,632 crore to the national exchequer.
According to the report, Dassault sold 36 Rafale jets to India at £7.5 billion in 2016, while 48 jets were sold to Qatar and Egypt at £7.9 billion in 2015. This amounted to Rs 1,670.7 crore per aircraft for India and Rs 1,319.8 crore to Qatar and Egypt.
The Congress also stressed that the current government's purchase price was much higher than the Rs 526 crore bid by the UPA regime.
The Indian armed forces recently expressed their disappointment with the budgetary allocation for defence, with Army vice chief Lt-General Sarath Chand remarking "the marginal increase barely accounts for inflation and does not even cater for taxes."
The "net" defence budget for 2018-2019 at Rs 2.79 lakh crore works out to just 1.49 per cent of the GDP, the lowest such figure since the war with China in 1962.
