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| Central Minister's tall talk may put him on Shashi Tharoor's footsteps | | | Abid Shah
EARLY TIMES REPORT
New Delhi, May 3: Close on the heels of exit of Shashi Tharoor from the Union Council of Ministers, another Central Minister has come under sharp public gaze for his alleged involvement in trafficking of arms in West Bengal from neighbouring Bangladesh.
Indications about this have come in a newspaper column published from here. And today Opposition members were up on their feet in the Rajya Sabha demanding a statement from Government about the entire affair.
The House had to be adjourned in the wake of noisy protests by the Opposition though the Union Minister of State for Rural Development, Shishir Adhikari, denied the allegations made against him after the publication of the column.
According to it, the Minister belonging to Trinamool Congress had said while informally chatting with reporter friends that gun running was a commonplace thing in West Bengal. Once a block level party worker approached him for money since he wanted to get arms.
He (the Minister) not only paid him Rs 1,20,000 but also suggested that he could go to border and get the arms from one of the dealers over there.
Confirming this, the writer of the column, Nora Chopra, told this correspondent that not only this there was also a row between the buyer and seller of the arms where Shishir Adhikari had to intervene in the wake of phone calls from the two. And, thus, self-admittedly the Minister told about his role in the arms deal to friendly Bengali reporters in a manner of "bragging" about his clout back home in Bengal.
She said that later the Minister denied the claims made by her in the column and threatened to file a case of defamation in a court of law. And yet the editor of the Sunday Guardian MJ Akbar had all praise for the column which caught the Minister talking tall in the presence of quite a few reporters, including her.
Significantly, the newspaper is owned and funded by noted lawyer Ram Jethmalani. And the disclosures made by it brought the entire Opposition on its feet. Those who cried foul in the Rajya Sabha today included the leader of BJP Arun Jaitley besides those like Brinda Karat from the CPI-M.
The Opposition has threatened to bring an adjournment motion in the House tomorrow to force Government to make a statement on the issue.
The entire episode though of a different and may be of a more serious nature inevitably reminds of recent resignation by Shashi Tharoor.
He had to quit his post after he himself boasted about winning the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket franchise for Kochi team through the help provided by him via his friend Sunanda Pushkar. Tharoor has been tweeting about these details when one of the newspapers broke the hell, forcing him to quit.
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