old but a worthy news about Rafale selection.
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Indian Politician Says Sonia Gandhi Has Rigged M-MRCA Deal for Rafale
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Livefist: Indian Politician Says Sonia Gandhi Has Rigged M-MRCA Deal for Rafale
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If the Indian M-MRCA fighter competition wasn't
quite surreal enough, in comes an Indian
politician-economist, notably re-energized by his
current association with India's "anti-corruption"
movement and India's monumental telecom
scam investigation, to stir the pot some more. A
known fire-bomber with an unabashed antipathy
to India's ruling Congress party, Subramanian
Swamy has now apparently trained his ire at the
IAF's $12-billion M-MRCA fighter deal.
Swamy, officially leader of the Janata Party, but
best known for years as a voluble and dogged
government baiter on all matters graft, says he
has written to Indian Prime Minister Dr
Manmohan Singh making some very dramatic
allegations. The letter (full text in image above)
was written on April 29, two days after the
dramatic M-MRCA elimination. Like all his letters,
this one says that it draws on "inside information"
from within the government. Let's get to the
contents:
Swamy writes: "My sources indicate that the pre-
determined decision to favour the French aircraft
[Dassault's Rafale] was the outcome of several
conversations between the wife of French
President Ms. Carla Bruni and the Chairperson of
the National Advisory Council Ms. Sonia Gandhi,
and surprisingly also with two foreign nationals
who are the sisters of Ms. Sonia Gandhi."
It is not clear what information Swamy has based
his allegations on.
At the very least, it should be said that
Subramanian Swamy was once quite aptly
described by a leading news weekly as "the
Professor Moriarty to Sonia's Sherlock Holmes",
so there shouldn't be any real surprise that the
target of his letter is specifically the Congress
Party president. That said, the allegations he
makes are indubitably explosive. Swamy's letter
refers to "credible information" in his possession,
but says nothing about what this credible
information is. It is not clear if he has shared any
further information with the Prime Minister apart
from this letter.
The operative part of his letter goes: "Based on
some credible information given to me on the
conversation between Ms. Carla Bruni and Ms
Sonia Gandhi’s sisters, there has been an
agreement of the French to pay a hefty bribe for
favouring the purchase of French aircrafts."
Interestingly, a popular Indian military
commentator has made a slightly backhanded
allusion to pretty much the same thing today. In
this column published in today's Pioneer, Maj Gen
(Retd) Ashok Mehta writes, "The IAF favours the
Rafale not the least because the French are
promising the moon. There is also a high level
back channel Italian connection, they say." So
either the columnist has read Subramanian
Swamy's letter, or has his own "insiders", in
which case, as you've no doubt guessed, we
have two prominent Indian figures saying that
the Rafale has already been chosen to win the M-
MRCA competition, and that it took a high-level
government connection -- Swamy names Sonia
Gandhi, the Maj Gen her nationality -- to work it
through.
It should be reiterated that neither of these
controversial assertions has been backed in
substance -- at least as far as I know -- in either
the letter or the column. We'll have to see where
this goes.
