<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
After all the stinging allegations made against the Rafale deal by Rahul Gandhi, the Modi government is facing the heat for it as well as huge loans given to cronies of the ruling party, damaging and eroding the independence of public institutions, trying claim credit for military operations, cow vigilantism, manipulating data inputs to make dubious economic claims etc. Instead, the Modi government continues to rant over past corruption scandals around 2G allocation, coal block allotment and Commonwealth Games which drove the narrative in 2014 as Prime Minister Narendra Modi rode to power. The Rafale deal also saw how the CAG had exonerated the government on the charge that it had bought overpriced jets from France, a key allegation by the opposition ahead of the May 2019 general election. The deal, the CAG noted, was 2.86 per cent cheaper than the one negotiated by the UPA for seven years, between 2007 and 2014. However, the CAG did not take into account the following- the price of 36 Rafale jets was 55 per cent higher than the UPA-era offer, loss incurred by not taking 25 per cent discount for Rafale as offered by Eurofighter, bank and sovereign guarantee waived, and no aircraft for 10 years with escalation cost to be paid. In a crafty move, the government utilised the top brass of the air force who defended the Rafale aircraft but could not respond to the specific allegations. The prime minister defended his personal Rafale bypass deal on two counts: better price and faster delivery. Both have been demolished by the revelations in the Hindu which had exposed the facts. Furthermore, the newspaper had also cited that three senior Defence Ministry officials who were the domain experts on the seven-member Indian Negotiating Team (INT) came to a “well-substantiated and clear conclusion” that the Narendra Modi government’s new Rafale deal for 36 flyaway aircraft was not on “better terms” than the offer made by Dassault Aviation during the procurement process for 126 aircraft under the United Progressive Alliance(UPA) government. Unlike its 2007 offer, Dassault did not provide any bank guarantees in 2015 and this is a very critical issue. Fudging of statistics prepared after changing the methodology in order to surpass the achievements under the UPA and remaining silent on jobs lost in industry are issues that the Modi government hasn’t answered. Even on the Rafale scam, when the Supreme Court pointed to the specific allegation against Modi for alleged corruption in the deal, the government claimed that the documents were missing\/stolen. Later it changed the stand by admitting that the documents were not stolen but that the contents were photocopied by those who were citing statistics. The government went further in warning publication of military matters attracted action under the Official Secrets Act. However the newspaper had only published comparative cost for Rafle under UPA and NDA but no mention about weaponry and which cannot attract provisions of the Act. Rahul’s attacks on the Rafale issue had been drowned by the Pulwama attack and subsequent Balakot narrative which the BJP is now trying to exploit for poll advantage. Rahul has been the lone ranger but unfortunately he hasn’t exactly proved that he has what it takes to lead the pack. He has reached the zenith and can go no further. Unfortunately, when the media itself has shown no inclination to probe facts, this has left the nation’s democracy to be decided by the outcome of the forthcoming polls. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Manipulation is the game<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}