Mehsana, Dec 22 (DHNS): Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday claimed Prime Minister Narendra Modi had received a fortune in kickbacks when he was the chief minister of Gujarat.
Sahara group had “paid” Modi Rs 40 crore in nine instalments over six months between October 2013 and February 2014, he said, giving specific dates and figures.
“Narendra Modiji, tell us whether this allegation is true or not… order an independent investigation and come clean. You have made the entire country stand in queues for days on end; now speak out the truth,” Rahul said at a massive public rally in Modi’s home district of Mehsana in northern Gujarat. Mehsana has been a BJP bastion for long and a hotbed of the Patel quota stir for over a year now.
Rahul went on to share date-wise details of the entries of Sahara group’s supposed payments to Modi. These records were found when the Income Tax Department raided the Sahara office on November 22, 2014, he said.
“This is not all. There is more. A computer record of Birla states that Gujarat CM (to be paid) Rs 25 crore. Of this, the record shows Rs 12 crore paid,” Rahul said, wondering why these companies paid money to the then Gujarat chief minister or whether they had made all false entries in their records.
“The Income Tax department has this information for over two and a half years,” he said. Though he was addressing the meeting at the epicentre of the Patel agitation, Rahul only made a brief reference to the reservation stir, stating that the police had used brutal force against women and children of the Patels to crush the “peaceful and non-violent agitation”.
The Congress vice president devoted a major part of his 45-minute speech to demonetisation. He said it was intended not at unearthing black money, fighting terror, unearthing fake currency or bringing in a cashless economy, but “to take away money from the poor, who constitute 99% of the population, and give it to 1% of rich industrialists, particularly some 50 families who helped make Modi who he is today”.
“The real reason is to keep the poor man’s money in banks for six to seven months so that banks could again extend loans to rich industrialists who have gobbled up the general public’s Rs 8 lakh crore,” he said.
“If any person takes a bank loan and fails to repay, he is jailed or his property is seized. But industrialists who refuse to repay bank loans are not called thieves, but mere defaulters and the money they have usurped is converted into NPAs,” Rahul said.