New Delhi: Congress leader and Punjab Minister Navjot Singh Sidhu on Saturday reeled out a list of 18 big defence and other contracts in 16 countries that PM Modi secured for the two big industrial houses of Anil Ambani and Adani by taking them along on his foreign trips at the cost of the government companies. Much before Rahul Gandhi exposed the Rafale scam of Modi securing the Rs30,000-crore offset contract for Anil Ambani’s Reliance Defence, Sidhu claimed Modi procured for this firm a contract worth $6 billion from Russia in 2015 for the air defence system.
At a press conference at the AICC headquarters in New Delhi on Saturday, Sidhu said Modi undertook some 55 foreign trips and took along with a handful of top industrialists to secure them and topping these favourites were certainly Ambani and Adani. He wondered if Modi was their “business development manager” promoting their interests not only within India but also abroad instead of helping the government companies going red.
Sidhu alleged Adani got contracts for the ship-borne unaided vehicles and another Rs7,000-crore contract for the single engine fighters. While in Israel, Adani secured contract for the unmanned aircraft system in March 2016 while Ambani got another contract worth Rs65,000 crore for air-to-air missiles for the Indian Air Force. Revealing many such deals that Modi secured for his industrialist friends, Sidhu said Ambani got a contract from the US Navy in 2017 that will give him a profit of Rs15,000 crore while Adani secured the largest greenfield coal mining project in Australia, an agreement signed in Malaysia for $32billion, a deal worth $500 million in Iran and so on. Contracts with China, Oman, Myanmar and Mozambique were all courtesy Modi.
Sidhu said India is certainly a “welfare state” but Modi believed in welfare of only the big houses and that too only those of Ambani and Adani at the cost of the state exchequer and yet fooling the people with the farcical slogan of “na khaunga, na khane dunga”. He said Modi came to power claiming his debut in Varanasi as a call from the Ganga to project himself as “Ganga ke laal”, but he will go out only as “Rafale ke dalaal”.
