BJP rallies behind Amit Shah

New Delhi: Enraged by the CBI’s move to chargesheet Gujarat Minister of State for Home Amit Shah, considered close to Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP today took the unprecedented step of declining an invitation to lunch from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The snub – delivered to protest what the BJP said was the “shameless misuse” of the CBI by the government for political purposes – foretold a stormy monsoon session of Parliament, scheduled to begin Monday.

Leaders of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, launched direct attacks on the government, and stoutly defended the role of the Modi government in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.

Jaitley said the CBI was behaving like an “extended arm” of the Congress, acting on “concocted and false” information. The agency, Jaitley alleged, had timed its action for the “political convenience of the Congress… This part of the investigation is completely concocted with the political agenda in mind”.

The decision to skip the Prime Minister’s lunch was taken by the BJP brass at a late-night meeting at the residence of senior leader L K Advani, and which Advani conveyed to Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee this morning. Later, the PMO too was intimated. Besides Advani, Sushma and Jaitley, BJP president Nitin Gadkari had also been invited to the lunch.

Sushma said the BJP had accepted the PM’s invitation, conveyed to them by Mukherjee during the Finance Minister’s own lunch for them last week. However, the atmosphere had since been “vitiated” by the CBI’s moves against Shah. “The environment was not cordial anymore,” Sushma said, and it would not have been “appropriate and proper to go and have lunch with him”.

Sushma said the Congress-led government uses the CBI to save “its own people” like Ottavio Quattrocchi, Jagdish Tytler and Satish Sharma, and to target leaders of the opposition such as Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Modi and Shah. The BJP has decided to raise the issue of “misuse of CBI” in Parliament.

Jaitley said the BJP had seen the CBI “changing its stand on the disproportionate assets case against Mulayam Singh Yadav during the nuclear deal stand-off and later in the DA case against Mayawati during the cut motions in Parliament… On the other hand, the investigation into the 2G spectrum scam has been put in the cold storage”.

The CBI, Jaitley said, “is acting on the political agenda of the Congress on the basis of baseless facts”.

“The government’s strategy is clear. Conduct a media trial first, give half-truths, create a prejudicial environment and use it for vote bank politics,” Jaitley said. The CBI’s latest moves were aimed at protecting the government from opposition attacks in Parliament by diverting attention from issues like price rise, the failed talks with Pakistan and the escape of Warren Anderson from India, he added.

Before deciding to decline the invitation to the PM’s lunch, Advani had called up Mukherjee to say that the CBI was “again” being misused to target the Gujarat government. “Stop it if you can,” Advani told Mukherjee.

Source: http://www.bharatchronicle.com/bjp-rallies-behind-amit-shah-skips-pms-lunch-7711