Continuing his tirade against the BJP-led government at the Centre over the Rafale deal, senior Congress leader and former Union Minister P. Chidambaram has asked the government to explain the reason behind limiting the purchase of the aircraft to 36 instead of 126 agreed to by the previous Congress regime.
Alleging something fishy in the high profile defence deal, Mr. Chidambaram, who heads the Congress manifesto committee and was here on Monday to interact with party office bearers on the manifesto, faulted the Modi government for limiting the purchase to 36 aircraft when the government claimed that they were purchasing the aircraft at a price 9% less than what agreed to by the Congress government.
“This is simple arithmetic. When we find that the price of a commodity, we proposed to buy has come down, we will buy more of the commodity taking advantage of the fall in price but the BJP government has done the other way around,” he said. “This question will arise even to a Class V student,” he said and demanded explanation for buying only 36 aircraft, instead of 126.
Noting that that the country has seen three defence ministers in the last four years and four months after the BJP came to power, Mr. Chidambaram said none seemed to have done anything worth. “Their only achievement is buying 36 aircraft instead of 126 when seven squadrons in the Indian Air Force were in dire need of 18 aircraft each,” he said.
“Don’t you doubt when the government is purchasing aircraft only for two squadrons,” he asked.
The former Union Minister said it was a matter of suspicion that the government has ignored the state owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) in the deal.
Answering a question, Mr Chidambaram said he had been pointing out the ‘blunders’ of the BJP government on the economic front in his weekly columns and the people were convinced that the government was incompetent in managing the Indian economy. Demonetisation, spiralling prices of petrol and diesel and the record fall of Indian rupee against US dollar bore testimony to it, he said.
To a question, he said the Congress was part of the DMK alliance in Tamil Nadu and the party would be happy if more parties joined the front. On AIADMK’s protest against the DMK and the Congress for their ‘complicity’ in the Eelam war in Sri Lanka, Mr Chidambaram said “the AIADMK leaders were nowhere during the war and do not even know what exactly happened.”