The electoral bond scheme (EBS) is the biggest extortion scheme and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the mastermind, former Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said on April 15, in response to the Prime Minister’s comments on the scheme in an interview to Asian News International (ANI).
The principal Opposition party asserted that the money trail through the EBS was only because of the Supreme Court as the State Bank of India (SBI) resisted full disclosures and called the Prime Minister’s defence of the scheme a “pathetic attempt at damage control”.
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“The important thing in electoral bond is names and dates. When you carefully see the names and dates you will know that when they [donors] gave the electoral bond, right after that some contract was given to them or a CBI inquiry was withdrawn against them,” Mr. Gandhi told reporters.
He said the Prime Minister should be asked to explain why one day the CBI inquiry starts against a company and soon after bonds were purchased, the inquiry was scrapped. Similarly, after a company donated electoral bonds, they were given the contract.
“Prime Minister is caught here, that’s why he is giving interview to ANI. This is the biggest extortion scheme of the world and PM Modi is the mastermind of it,” Mr. Gandhi alleged.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said, “The electoral bond money trail is ENTIRELY because of the Supreme Court which is now being threatened. The PM is as usual lying since he got SBI to resist full disclosure till the last minute. Pathetic attempt at damage control”.
“The SBI demanded three months to match donor data with political parties. It took less than 15 seconds and just five lines of Python code. Clearly, the SBI was seeking to postpone disclosure of donors on behalf of the Modi Sarkar,” Mr. Ramesh added in a subsequent statement.
