A day after four Rajya Sabha members from the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) joined the Bharatiya Janata Party, opposition parties alleged the development reflected a strategy that undermined the Constitution.
Rivals of the BJP, particularly the Congress and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati, said pointed out that two of the four defectors who joined the BJP had been facing serious charges of corruption, and were the targets of strident attacks by BJP leaders during the election campaign.
YS Chowdary and CM Ramesh are under investigation by multiple federal agencies, including the Income Tax department (I-T), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED).
In November, 2018, BJP MP GVL Narasimha Rao petitioned the chairman of ethics committee to disqualify both MPs. While both MPs said they were innocent, Ramesh at the time accused the Union government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of using federal agencies for political agenda.
The case against Chowdary is centred on alleged loan fraud by companies linked to him and allegations that some of the money secured as credit from banks may have been laundered.
The BJP has “engineered defections to manufacture majority” in the Rajya Sabha, Congress’s Randeep Singh Surjewala alleged in a statement issued on Friday, where he said the BJP tactics “were based on threats, coercion, money power, muscle power and enticements”.
A similar charge was made by Uttar Pradesh ex-CM Mayawati, who said that it seemed that “everything is fair in BJP brand of politics and nothing is wrong”. “BJP had earlier dubbed two of these MPs as corrupt, but now after joining their party, the lawmakers have become pure,” she said.
The allegations came even as the TDP met Rajya Sabha chairman Venkaiah Naidu and protested against the inclusion of their four MPs with the BJP. The delegation demanded that the merger should not be allowed.
The oldest of the cases against Chowdary goes back to 2007, when the CBI registered three cases against his companies based on complaints from three banks. The investigations were back in focus last year, months after TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu walked out of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in March, 2018.
In October, the ED conducted a series of raids on locations linked to Chowdary. In some of the raids, authorities seized high-end cars, including a Ferrari and a Range Rover, and documents that purported to show evidence of wrongdoing.
Around the same time in October, Income Tax authorities raided offices and houses linked to Ramesh in Hyderabad and Kadapa and seized documents pertaining to alleged tax evasion through inflated invoicing and routing of funds into shell companies.
First Published:
Jun 22, 2019 00:02 IST
Source: HindustanTimes