New Delhi:
The government today hit back at a belligerent Opposition, saying the BJP stage-managed the cash-for- votes sting to frame the UPA.
Leading the attack, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal charged the BJP with contacting a TV channel and setting up the sting. He also named some senior BJP leaders.
"The BJP stage-managed this tamasha...it's the BJP's habit to twist and turn the statements in the way they like... what PM has said is in front of everyone...but everyone is taking out their own meaning as per their convenience," he said in the Lok Sabha. Bansal also blamed the BJP for using "tactics of maligning the Prime Minister." In the Rajya Sabha, Home Minister P Chidambaram also reiterated that the Opposition was drawing its own conclusions.
Their statement came after the Opposition tore into the government over the WikiLeaks cable on cash-for-votes scam. The cable states that the Congress bought MPs ahead of its vote of confidence in 2008 over the nuclear deal with the US. But the PM told Parliament last week that there was no reason to believe that the cable was authentic, and that the Indian players mentioned in them have challenged the facts stated within.
The BJP, however, alleges that the PM "misled" the House by claiming that MPs were not bribed during the July 2008 trust vote even though the Parliamentary probe committee said that money was paid.
Directing her attacks on the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition Sushma Swaraj said today that Dr Singh was directly responsible for the scam and that it was not good enough to state that he was unaware of what was being done to try and save his government. "The PM is accountable...he can't keep putting blame on others," she said, slamming Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his earlier statement over the issue.
(Cash-for-votes: Ignorance no excuse, says BJP)"The Government rejects that allegation absolutely hands down. The allegations of bribery were investigated by the 14th Lok Sabha. The KC Deo committee concluded that there was insufficient evidence to draw any conclusion of bribery," he had said.
On July 22 2008, Dr Manmohan Singh won the vote of confidence by a slim margin. The Left had quit the government over India's nuclear deal with the US. In the days leading upto the vote, there were hectic political negotiations to win new friends and influence people.
The cash-for-votes scam erupted hours before the vote of confidence took place when three BJP MPs walked into the Lok Sabha with cash that they said added upto three crore rupees. They claimed that that they had been offered this money to vote for the nuclear deal and had planned a sting operation to prove this.
A Lok Sabha committee, headed by Congress MP KC Deo, was set up to examine their allegations, but found that there was no evidence of the BJP's claims. Mr Deo told NDTV that he does not believe the WikiLeaks revelation merits a re-examination of what transpired.