Sushma Swaraj scandal is political maneouvering

Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj’s controversial assistance to Lalit Modi has been the subject of heated debate in the national media over the past week. At least two television channels keep flashing the claim that they are the first in making the exposé. Their fight to being on top is ridiculous and laughable. What people are interested in is not their ranking but the news they bring.

Coming to the controversy, this issue, as any other in the recent past, has been blown out of proportion to get political mileage by Opposition parties, particularly the Congress. It is preposterous and irresponsible of Congress to show pictures from 2010 of Narendra Modi with Lalit Modi and claim they are linked. By the same logic, Congress party members Shashi Tharoor, Sharad Pawar and Rajeev Shukla were close to Lalit Modi when the Congress was in power. Do they also have links? There is a limit to exaggeration.

Swaraj claims the assistance was provided on humanitarian grounds. She had only asked UK authorities to consider Modi’s request within the ambit of UK laws and did not make recommendations, nor did she ask for favours. When the email correspondence leaked, the media were busy connecting the dots, which they are good at. As a result, it was found that Swaraj’s daughter was Lalit Modi’s lawyer and her husband, too, was a lawyer who appeared for Modi in the past. With this finding came the charge of conflict of interest. But where is the conflict? Both are lawyers by profession and have every right to represent whom they want to represent. Many Congress ministers have kin who are lawyers who may have defended criminals in the past.

Therefore, all the allegations doing the rounds in the media are nothing but stories cooked up and dished out by television channels to their viewers. There is neither substance nor truth to it.

This is the same Congress party that allowed criminals to escape and failed to initiate any action for the extradition of Lalit Modi, which today talks of propriety. It is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

— The writer is an Indian finance manager based in Dubai