Q shadow over House session, Oppn set to target Govt, Sonia

BJP president Rajnath Singh said: “We will raise the matter in both Houses of Parliament. The Government will have to give a reply. We will seek a reply from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on why his government delayed by 17 days the announcement on Quattrocchi’s arrest. We also want to know why the London accounts were defrozen and where did the money go.”

BJP sources said that the Quattrocchi case was the “biggest issue at the moment” and could overshadow the Budget presentations. The party will target Sonia Gandhi, highlighting “how the Quattrocchi case was wilfully botched”.

BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley, who is secretary of the BJP parliamentary board and has closely followed the Bofors case, told The Indian Express: “We will keep the Quattrocchi issue alive in Parliament, inside and outside it, and make sure that Quattrocchi’s political patrons are on the defensive. We will also put pressure (on the Government) to bring him to India. In case this does not happen, it will mean that the obvious expectation of the Government from the CBI is that it should fail (to bring Quattrocchi to India).”

The party believes it is constrained by the fact that the Railway budget will be presented in Lok Sabha and that should not be disrupted. There are, however, no such compulsions for the party in the Rajya Sabha. “There is no binding on the Opposition on raising the Quattrocchi case in Rajya Sabha tomorrow (Monday) because of the Railway budget. We are having a meeting of the NDA in the morning, and if we decide that the matter is serious enough to overshadow the Railway Budget and General Budget, we will ensure that it takes precedence over them. In any case, this issue will overpower everything else,” said Sushma Swaraj, BJP’s Deputy Leader in Rajya Sabha. Her reference was to other issues like rising prices, inflation on which the party had given notice for discussion.

According to Sushma Swaraj, the Opposition strategy will have three primary objectives: to focus on Quattrocchi’s assumed “proximity” to Sonia Gandhi; to target External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee for “deliberately” delaying announcement of the businessman’s detention in Argentina; to pinpoint instances of CBI “collusion” in letting Quattrocchi walk free in the Bofors case, that the agency “deliberately lied” to the Supreme Court on Quattrocchi’s whereabouts.

The BJP believes it has the UPA in a bind over Quattrocchi — in a “no-win situation”, according to Jaitley. “If Quattrocchi comes to India, the focus will be on him and this will be an embarrassment for the Congress. On the other hand, if the Government fails to bring him to India, it will signal the fact that the Government deliberately sabotaged his extradition,” said Jaitley.