THE Opposition Congress seems to have woken up to last month’s Tehelka tapes about the Best Bakery pay-off to corner BJP over its alleged efforts to secure Best Bakery carnage prime witness Zaheera Sheikh’s dramatic turnaround in November.
Gujarat Congress chief BK Gadhvi on Monday said his party would seek a written explanation from Vadodara’s Congress councillor Chandrakant Shrivastav about his role in the alleged payment of bribes to Zaheera Sheikh to secure her crucial change of statement.
“Chandrakant had denied the Tehelka allegations as baseless, but we are now going to ask him to give the same in writing,” the GPCC president said in a news conference. Chandrakant is a cousin of Vadodara BJP legislator Madhu Srivastava, who was captured on camera by Tehelka while purpotedly claiming that Zaheera was paid Rs 18 lakh in cash to turn hostile in this post-Godhra rioting case that had become a major embarrassment for the Modi government.
Gadhvi was in his elements as he lashed out at the state’s ruling BJP, levelling allegations of incompetence and misuse of public money against Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
“Modi is living in a state of total hallucination even as there is no real development taking place in Gujarat as a result of his pet projects like Vibrant Gujarat. These celebrations have cost the state exchecquer crores of rupees,” said Gadhvi.
Gadhvi criticised Modi for the much-publicised ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ campaign to woo investors to the state. “The facts and figures clearly show that this campaign has so far been a means to pull wool over the eyes of the people,” he said. Gadhvi said Modi’s claim that the campaign last year had resulted in signing of MoUs of Rs 66,000 crore was “false and misleading”.
He said MoUs of Rs 37,000 crore were actually signed before the Vibrant Gujarat campaign started last year. “When the Chief Minister said during the last Assembly sessions that investments of only Rs 11,000 crore have actually come, where are the results? Besides, MoUs of about Rs 10,000 crore have been rejected,” said Gadhvi. He also criticised the government for organising the global investors’ summit this month when the country was recovering from the tsunami’s devastations.
Gadhvi also alleged that the government was favouring the Essar Group by extending to it sales tax exemptions and thus helping it to make profits of over Rs 6,000 crore. He said the Congress would seek a white paper from the government over this. Meanwhile, the Essar Group denied in a statement the allegations, calling them “politically motivated and baseless”.