Congress fires privilege notice against Sushma
Taking a hint from Rahul Gandhi's tweet on Facebook data theft, which he says was invented to take the death of 39 Indians in Iraq from the media radar, the Congress on Thursday fired a privilege motion in the Rajya Sabha against External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. She has been accused of repeatedly misleading the House to believe that the victims abducted in 2014 were alive.
‘‘We wanted to give notice on Thursday, but we had to postpone the move as the Rajya Sabha secretary-general was not available," the Congress leaders said.
Senior Congress MPs Ambika Soni and Partap Singh Bajwa told reporters that Swaraj tried to suppress information by claiming privilege while asserting that the victims will be rescued from the ISIS custody and brought back.
"Her statement was considered as an assurance that was based on false premises, warranting breach of privilege," the two leaders said.
They said she finally acknowledged the deaths in the Rajya Sabha only on the realisation that the government's cover of secrecy was being blown up by the Martyr Foundation in Iraq.
Still, she did not bother to first inform the families; nor was there a word on how the Centre is going to compensate the families for giving them false hope that everyone was alive and safe.
Instead of announcing a financial compensation or promising government jobs to the families, they said Swaraj tried to score browning points in the House, showing how insensitive she could be. They wanted the Centre to give Rs 1 crore to each family to overcome the loss of the bread earners. The victims were all poor labourers.
The government had also refused to accept the eyewitness account of one Masih -who had managed to escape from captivity – stating that all the 39 Indians had been shot dead. He challenged Swaraj to reveal the concrete proof the government had to dispute Masih's narrative.
Bajwa said she not only dubbed eye-witness Masih's narration as a cock-&-bull story, but he was kept in detention by the RAW, given a job offer and pressurised to make false statements; later, he was put in jail. When a television news channel out a report that the Indians were all dead, the government should have resorted to a course correction, but it stuck to the lie to use the episode for political mileage.
‘‘Even when the minister was announcing the deaths, she was playing politics. She didn’t inform the families whom she misled for so long and tried to defame the Congress and give credit to her government. She said her junior minister General (retd) V K Singh had to sleep on the floor. Was that the issue…? We should be sorry for the families or the discomfort V K Singh suffered," Bajwa asked. The majority of the victims were from Punjab, some others from Himachal Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.