Swaraj, Jaitley to face Cong privilege move?

The main Opposition Congress on Friday demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should come clean on the Lalit Modi controversy after realising that top Union ministers and the BJP are trying to protect the former IPL boss by favouring his extradition rather than seeking his deportation. It also indicated bringing a privilege motion against Union ministers Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley on this issue.

Asked whether the Congress would bring a privilege motion against Ms Swaraj for misleading Parliament over the issue of deportation of Lalit Modi, Mr Surjewala said that the Congress Parliamentary Party would take an “appropriate decision” in the matter.

Addressing a press conference, AICC chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said: “The Modi government, including finance minister and foreign minister, has painstakingly attempted to bury Modigate by asserting that deportation of Indian fugitive Lalit Modi was not possible.”

“Both inside and outside Parliament, finance minister Jaitley and foreign minister Swaraj have also mentioned that the only option was to proceed with extradition of Lalit Modi,” he said. “The Modi government has taken this stance with full knowledge that the extradition process is lengthy enough to take eight to 10 years by which time public memory will fade away from Modigate,” Mr Surjewala said while drawing attention to how the Modi government refused to place in the public domain various communications exchanged between the then finance minister P. Chidambaram with the UK government for immediate deportation of Mr Lalit Modi for being prosecuted in accordance with the Indian law. Mr Chidambaram had written three communications on July 8, 2013, August 21, 2013 and March 14, 2014 for deportation of Mr Lalit Modi instead of extradition, he said. He said what is most noteworthy is the fact that deportation of illegal immigrants from the UK does not require the person being deported to be facing a criminal proceedings in the country of his origin. Deportation ( also called removal proceedings) is possible under Sections 9 and 10 of the Immigration and Asylum Act, 1999 in the UK. “By helping Lalit Modi get travel documents on August 1, 2014 ( pursuant to request made by Sushma Swaraj in July 2014), the Modi government ensured that no case for deportation survives against Lalit Modi and extradition procedure itself would take a decade.”