Modi's BJP Encircles Congress Over Alleged Corruption in Rafale Fighter Jet Tender

French firm Dassault Aviation has been delivering Rafale pristine condition fighter jets to India according to a €7.9 billion ($9.2 billion) Inter-governmental Agreement (IGA) signed in September 2018. The Narendra Modi government made this deal after scrapping a tender issued by Congress-led UPA government in which Dassault emerged as the winner.

A major political row flared up in India after the French investigative website Mediapart published a report which claimed Dassault Aviation paid bribes worth €7.5 million to a middleman to win the multi-billion global contract in India.

On Tuesday, India's federally ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused the main opposition party Congress of delaying defence procurement for commissions during its tenure between 2004 2014.

"Let Rahul Gandhi answer from Italy - why did he and his party try to spread lies about Rafale all these years? Now it has been revealed that their own government was in power from 2007 to 2012 when commissions were paid, in which a middleman's name has also come up," the BJP's spokesman Sambit Patra said while dubbing Indian National Congress as the 'I Need Comissions' party.

Parliamentarian Rahul Gandhi is leader of the Congress party.

Countering the charges, Congress said that the latest revelations by French media reveal "the dubious cooperation between Narendra Modi's government and the Central Bureau of Investigation's Enforcement Directorate to bury the Rafale Corruption."

"Each revelation in the murky Rafale scam in the last five years - every single allegation and each piece of the puzzle - leads right up to the highest echelons of power in the Modi Government. The Modi government has compromised our national security," Pawan Khera, the national spokesman of Congress, alleged on Tuesday.

The Modi govt sacrificed ‘national security’, jeopardized the interests of the Indian Air Force and caused loss worth thousands of crores to our exchequer through the Rafale scam.

If this is not fake nationalism, then what is?#RafaleBJPCoverUpExposed pic.twitter.com/pNEAxlTA1a

— Congress (@INCIndia) November 9, 2021

Congress asked the BJP to explain why CBI Director Alok Verma was hounded out of office 12 days after the anti-corruption agency received evidence against suspected middleman Sushen Gupta from Mauritius on the Rafale deal.

"Sushen Gupta is a middleman, and Dassault hired him in 2000 while the BJP was in government, and gave €2 million in January 2004 during the BJP government. This is not an allegation but a fact," Khera said while demanding a joint parliamentary inquiry into the deal.

The CBI is the supreme anti-corruption agency of the country.

Mediapart claimed in its investigative report that despite documents detailing the bribery transactions having existed since 2018, the CBI Enforcement Directorate did not open an investigation.

The 36-jet Rafale deal was signed with France in 2016 by the Narendra Modi-led government after a seven-year exercise involving 126 aircraft for the Indian Air Force did not materialise under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime.