BENGALURU: Lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan has said the Rafale fighter aircraft deal is by far the biggest defence scam in the country, and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi alone is responsible for it.
Speaking here on Sunday, Bhushan outlined many perceived irregularities in the Rafale deal, including the change in the number of aircraft, the varying estimates of its cost and the government’s secrecy over it, and industrialist Anil Ambani’s role in the deal.
He said the defence acquisition council had initially decided to procure 126 aircraft, of which 18 were to be purchased and the rest were to be manufactured locally. But the number of aircraft was brought down to 36, with none of them to be manufactured locally, Bhushan said. “This has a very serious security implication because the Air Force has been left high and dry,” he added.
Bhushan said Finance Minister Arun Jaitley attributed the increased cost to India-specific add-ons, but no tenders were called for the add-ons. He then questioned why Ambani was being paid Rs 21,000 crore, in spite of the latter saying that Reliance would not manufacture a single component of the aircraft.
“In the Bofors scam, the commission was only Rs 64 crore, while here it is 400 times that amount. This is the mother of all defence scams,” he added.