A four-year-old complaint against Rahul Gandhi’s citizenship by Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy resurfaced in the thick of the election campaign on Tuesday with the Home Ministry asking the Congress President to clarify the “factual position”.

The BJP simultaneously labelled him as a “synonym of fabrication”. The Congress’ response was summed up by party leader and Congress President’s sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who referred to the BJP’s latest tranche of allegations as “rubbish”.

The Home Ministry’s letter to Rahul Gandhi, dispatched on April 29, asked the Congress President to clarify the factual position in response to a complaint by Subramanian Swamy — that he (Rahul) had declared his nationality as British.

Swamy had written a letter to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 based on evidence which had formed the basis of a PIL in the Supreme Court in the same year. The Apex Court had dismissed as “frivolous” the PIL demanding a CBI probe into Gandhi’s citizenship.

The complaint pertains to a BPO company — BackOps Ltd — set up by Rahul Gandhi and Ulrik McKnight in 2003, and it was dissolved in 2009.

In the incorporation documents of the company, Gandhi is listed as an Indian citizen and McKnight as an American. In the company’s annual returns submitted in 2004, the form with printed answers recorded Gandhi’s nationality as British, which was crossed out and submitted by hand as Indian.

But an annual return submitted in 2006 reportedly referred to Gandhi as “British”, a fact dismissed by the Congress on various occasions as “clerical error” or “typo”. However, Swamy had persisted with the complaint even with the Ethics Committee of Parliament’s inquiry into these allegations.

The Ethics Committee, headed by BJP veteran LK Advani, had served a show cause notice to Gandhi to which he replied in March, 2016, asserting that he had “never applied for citizenship of any other country” and termed the charge as a “political conspiracy” to tarnish his image.

Political slugfest

But after the Home Ministry’s letter on the same complaint, the political slugfest started with BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra branding the Congress President as a “synonym for fabrication”.

“Rahul Gandhi must issue a clarification on citizenship. He has gone around making allegations against other people based on fake documents whereas his own citizenship, educational qualifications and every other issue is under suspicion,” said Patra.

While the Congress President himself did not respond to the fresh allegations, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra reacted sharply.

“This is absolute garbage. The whole country knows when he was born, how he grew up and what he does. Kya bakwas hai yeh (what kind of rubbish is this),” she said.

 

 

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