New Delhi : Fugitive Lalit Modi tried to widen the ambit of his political disclosures by pulling in names of Sonia Gandhi’s daughter Priyanka and her husband Robert Vadra in his latest bout of tweets late Thursday night.
Modi claimed that he had “bumped” into party president Sonia Gandhi’s daughter Priyanka and her husband Robert Vadra in a London restaurant last year. He did not imply any wrongdoing on their part, but the BJP, smarting under several damaging revelations in the last fortnight, immediately went into an attacking mode.
“The Congress must explain. Why is Mrs Gandhi silent,” demanded BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra. Another party spokesman GVL Narsimha Rao sought an answer from Priyanka: “What is the relationship between the Gandhi family and Lalit Modi. Why did Priyanka Gandhi and Robert Vadra meet Lalit Modi in London? Priyanka Gandhi needs to clarify on the matter in public.”
The Congress asserted that Priyanka and Vadra had “committed no crime”. Party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said there was no “social interaction” of any nature between them. “Looking at each other in a restaurant is neither a crime nor morally improper.”
In an interaction with the media at the AICC headquarters in the morning, he had accused Modi of working at the behest of BJP to divert attention to “non-issues” and reiterated the party’s demand for resignations of Sushma Swaraj and Vasundhara Raje.
Lalit Modi had cleverly drafted his tweet to give an impression that there had been indeed a meeting with Priyanka and Robert, but a closer scrutiny revealed that he actually wanted to meet them.
“Happy to meet the GandhiFamily in London,” was how the tweet started. But the additional tweets made it clear that there was no meeting as such: “I had run into Robert and Priyanka separately in a restaurant — they were with Timmy Sarna.
He has my no. They can call me. Will tell them what I feel about them exactly…’’ Interestingly, Timmy Sarna, who is mentioned in the above tweet, is the managing director of DLF brands. This was a clever allusion to Robert Vadra’s Haryana land deals with DLF, which are also under the scanner.
The Congress, too, kept up the heat in ‘Lalitgate’ and charged that Vasundhararje Scindia was involved in a quid pro quo deal with the disgraced former IPL chief Lalit Modi.The party charged that Scindia was a direct beneficiary of Modi’s Rs. 13-crore investment in a firm owned by her son.
The party released papers filed by Scindia ahead of her election in 2013 in which she said she owned nearly 3,000 shares in Niyant Heritage Hotels Limited, owned by her son, Dushyant Singh, who is a BJP MP.