The Congress on Wednesday hit the streets to protest the Enforcement Directorate’s chargesheet against Sonia and Rahul Gandhi in the National Herald money-laundering case, terming it “vendetta in legal disguise”.
The party has decided to fight back on and off the streets in support of the Congress’s first family as it awaits the next date in the ongoing legal battle.
“There is not even a whiff of a crime of any sort,” Congress Rajya Sabha member Abhishek Manu Singhvi said, maintaining that the government was trying to create a fake narrative to divert attention from bread-and-butter issues.
Earlier in the day, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge set the ball rolling as the BJP kept up the pressure by fielding former law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to brief the media on the case. Addressing Prime Minister Narendra Modi directly in a post on X, Kharge said: “Your despotic Sarkar is hell-bent on targeting the Congress, to whitewash its own sins. BJP’s Economic Mismanagement is spiralling out of control. Desperation is gathering steam. No vision, no solution, only diversion!”
He went on to list what the party saw as burning issues from which the government wanted to divert attention — trade deficit, shrinking consumer confidence, slowdown in revenue growth of FMCG firms, hike in LPG prices and growing unemployment.
Briefing reporters later in the day, Singhvi said the National Herald case was a one-trick wonder and the government had launched a money-laundering probe without there being any movement of money or property. Providing a chronology of sorts, he said the Congress used to provide funds to Associated Journals Ltd (AJL) to keep the publication going. A not-for-profit company, Young India was created to manage the affairs of the National Herald. AJL’s debt was transferred to Young India. “Transfer and assignment of debt is a known phenomenon in law. How’s it illegal?”
Young India, he explained, is a Section 8 company where no dividends can be paid and no commercial transactions can take place. “Show us the money trail and proceeds of the crime," Singhvi said, referring to a Supreme Court judgment of 1955 that established that ownership remains with the parent company and does not transfer to the shareholding entity.
On the filing of the chargesheet, Singhvi said it had to be done within a year and time was running out.
On BJP spokespersons’ remark that the Congress as a political party should not have funded a private entity, Singhvi said: “Is it a crime for the Congress to support and rejuvenate something it had started… doesn’t the BJP not do it all the time for its sister organisations?"
