Questions leaked for ‘Exam Warrior’: Will the PM reply on Rafale today?

After putting the Government on the backfoot in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, Congress President Rahul Gandhi dared the Prime Minister to attend Parliament and reply to questions on Rafale. Recalling the Prime Minister saying in his hour and a half interview to ANI that nobody was raising a finger at him on Rafale, the Congress President wondered in which world he lived in. “ The whole country is pointing a finger at you, Prime Minister,” he added.

The questions raised by the Congress President in the Lok Sabha were the following :

• How was the deal negotiated after eight years of hard work changed?
• Did the Indian Air Force ask you to change the deal and purchase 36 aircraft instead of 126?
• Is there an objection by defence ministry officials to the increase in the benchmark price mentioned on the files?
• Is there a file noting (by a defence ministry official) asking the Prime Minister’s Office not to interfere?

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his reply had banked on the Supreme Court allegedly having given the Government a ‘clean chit’ and alleged corruption cases involving Congress leaders. Congress has not responded because both Agusta Westland and the National herald cases are before the court.

But will the Prime Minister appear in the Lok Sabha today and reply to the questions raised is the million Rupee question.

Later on Wednesday evening, the Congress President cheekily ‘leaked’ four more questions, distilled from the earlier ones, for the Prime Minister, who is claimed to have written a book “ Exam Warriors” to help students facing examinations, to respond to.

1. Why 36 aircraft, instead of the 126 the IAF needed?

Q2. Why 1,600 Cr instead of 560 Cr per aircraft.

Q4. Why AA instead of HAL?

He held back the third question before tweeting,

“Q3: Modi Ji, please tell us why Parrikar Ji keeps a Rafale file in his bedroom & what’s in it?”

The audio clip of a recorded conversation between Goa’s health minister Vishwajit Rane and a third person, presumed to be a journalist from outside Goa, is also going to figure in the discussion again, with the Government expected to point out that both Parrikar and Rane had claimed the clip had been doctored.

But asked about the denial, the Congress President on Wednesday evening replied with a counter question. “ Had you been in their shoes, what would you have done ?” He went on to claim that the clip was genuine and suggested there might be more tapes.

The ailing Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar, who was the Defence Minister, when the Prime Minister had made a unilateral announcement of a new Rafale deal in Paris, is alleged in the clip to have confided that he had all the Rafale files in his bedroom.

Parrikar, who visited the Secretariat on Tuesday for the first time in four months, again spent an hour in the Secretariat on Wednesday.