Jaitley will come out with flying colours: PM Modi

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday filed a defamation suit against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and sought Rs. 10 crore in damages for accusing him of corruption when he headed the DDCA.

India’s finance minister today filed a defamation suit against Delhi’s leader who had accused him of large-scale corruption in his former role as head of the capital’s cricket association.

The others who have been named in both the petitions are Kumar Vishwas, Ashutosh, Sanjay Singh, Raghav Chadha and Deepak Bajpai.

Mentioning Modi’s remarks at the BJP parliamentary party meet, he said the prime minister had talked of Jaitley coming out clean in the alleged DDCA irregularities as Advani had done in the hawala case. He wondered why was Mr Jaitley was shying away from facing commission of enquiry into the DDCA Scam.

In the latest episode of Azad-Jaitley verbal duel, Arun Jaitley alleged that Kirti Azad had met Congress president Sonia Gandhi during the UPA tenure and this triggered the investigation.

On Monday, too, the ruling party displayed a similar show of strength when Jaitley was accompanied by senior BJP leaders and Union ministers M. Venkaiah Naidu, J.P. Nadda, Smriti Irani, Dharmendra Pradhan, Piyush Goyal and Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore.

Yesterday, shortly after Mr. Azad addressed the press conference, Mr. Kejriwal had announced that the Delhi Government had chose to set up a Commission of Inquiry into the case. Modi said it was a planned move by the Congress where it was levelling “baseless” allegations against one minister after the other. The Delhi CM and his party said Jaitley should resign or be removed to clear the way for a probe, and that they were planning to file a police case against Jaitley “very soon”.

The Assembly also passed a motion moved by deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia against the CBI raid at Delhi Secretariat, condemning the Centre for its alleged high handedness and adding it was in “violation of the federal structure” and the “spirit of the Constitution”. And the investigation against Jaitley and the DDCA will now be seen as a path for Kejriwal to get his revenge.

CPI-M General Secretary Sitaram Yechury claimed that Modi has signalled to Jaitley to resign in the wake of DDCA row by citing Advani’s example in the Hawala case. “You take it”, he said.

The matter was raised in the Lok Sabha by Congress member K.C. Venugopal, who said the allegations were serious and that there appeared to have been gross irregularities in the DDCA.