Published 16:41 IST, June 25th 2020
Senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani questions Congress for not making MoU with CPC public
Senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani on Thursday slammed the Congress party for not revealing the contents of the 2008 MoU signed with Communist Party of China.
Senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani on Thursday slammed the Congress party for not revealing the contents of the 2008 MoU signed with the Communist Party of China. He mentioned that Congress president Sonia Gandhi had given a "freewheeling interview" regarding the agreement to the Chinese news agency Xinhua but was yet to share it with the Indian public. Jethmalani questioned whether the Congress party was hesitant to share the MoU because its terms were more in favour of China than India. The senior advocate was referring to Goa Chronicle's article which featured certain quotes from Sonia Gandhi's written interview to Xinhua in 2011. Earlier, he had demanded an NIA probe into this matter citing "possible sinister implications for the country’s security".
PIL filed in SC
On Wednesday, a Public Interest Litigation was filed in the Supreme Court seeking an NIA probe into the MoU signed between the Congress party and the Communist Party of China on August 7, 2008. Maintaining that the nation's security could not be compromised by anyone, the petitioners claimed that the aforesaid agreement pertained to exchanging high-level information and cooperation between Congress and the CPC besides providing the two parties with the "opportunity to consult each other on important bilateral, regional and international developments”. Thereafter, they listed the visits of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her family to China during this period, which included attending the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.
Alleging that there were nearly 600 Chinese intrusions from 2008 to 2013 on India's side of the LAC, the PIL noted that the Congress-led UPA was in power at that juncture. The PIL added that the Congress party had refused to make the contents of the MoU public despite repeated appeals from one of the petitioners, Savio Rodrigues- the Editor-in-Chief of Goa Chronicle. According to the PIL, the MoU had evoked several questions such as whether the national security could be sabotaged by an agreement with the "enemy state".
Updated 16:41 IST, June 25th 2020