‘ Some pay 100cr ` for a seat in RS’

Jind/ Chandigarh: Congress leader Chaudhary Birender Singh has kicked up a controversy with his claim that there are people who shell out up to 100 crore to get

` a Rajya Sabha seat. The BJP latched on to his remarks to

accuse the Congress of being in the habit of “cut

ting out deals”.

Jind/ Chandigarh, July 29: Senior Congress leader Chaudhary Birender Singh has kicked up a controversy with his claim that there are people who shell out upto ` 100 crore to get a Rajya Sabha seat.

As the BJP latched on to his remarks to accuse Congress of being in the habit of “cutting out deals” and having brought politics in the country to such a “low level”, Mr Singh, a Rajya Sabha MP, went into damage control on Monday claiming that what appeared on media was an “entirely wrong version” of what he had said.

Addressing a rally in Jind on Sunday, the Congress leader had said, “Once someone told me that he had a budget of ` 100 crore to become a Rajya Sabha MP. But when he totalled the expenditure later, he found it was ` 80 crore and he had ended up saving ` 20 crore. Now you think, a man who succeeds taking the membership of Rajya Sabha by spending ` 80 crore or ` 100 crore, what will they think about the poor,” he had added.

Facing flak for his remarks, Mr Singh said, “my version was simple that there is a trend of new political class... More people with money power.. They are entering in Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha and I had given figures from a newspaper”.

“... I had made a mention that after the Lok Sabha results of 2009, certain figures were given in a newspaper report that 360 of the candidates, who had won were crorepatis and a dozen and half of them were billionaries ( arabpatis),” he added.

Mr Singh said this was how the money power is becoming more important in Parliamentary democracy.