NEW DELHI: Former BJP leaders Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie and senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan on Wednesday slammed the Centre over the Rafale deal and termed it a bigger scam than Bofors.
"Bofors was nothing compared to the Rafale scam, I can tell you as a person who covered it," Shourie said during a Press conference, and added that it was the duty of journalists to unearth facts related to the deal that the government was trying to conceal.
The trio also questioned the government preferring a private company with no experience in the field of defence over Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), which has been building aircraft for decades, to be the Indian partner of Dassault Aviation, the manufacturer of Rafale, under the offset clause in the deal.
The Opposition has been alleging gross discrepancies in the deal and has also accused Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman of lying to the nation at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
They alleged that the deal was a case of monumental criminal misconduct or misuse of public office. "This is a textbook case of criminal misconduct of misuse of public office, and of enriching parties at the expense of national interest and security," Bhushan said, and added that the country was being misled by the contradictory and ever-shifting statements of the minister and gross misuse of the media.
The trio also alleged that the secrecy clause of the deal was also being twisted and the change in the number of aircraft being procured was also a surprise to many. "I have been told that nobody in the air force was consulted to bring down the number of fighters bought from 126 to just 36," Bhushan said.
The three urged the government to come out with the facts of the deal. "The Opposition should pursue the case with the same intensity that the BJP had pursued the Bofors case," Shourie said
Sinha urged the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) to conduct an audit of the deal. "The CAG should conduct an audit of the deal and submit a report within three months in Parliament. Bofors pales into insignificance as compared to Rafale," he said.