Vote-buying was BJP ruse: Tehelka Report

The cash-for-votes scandal that has been rocking the Indian parliament since last Thursday was actually an orchestrated operation by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to gain political leverage over the Congress, claims a report by a news magazine.

Known for its explosive investigative stories, the Tehelka magazine, in a report prepared for its next issue, details what it describes as the untold side of the vote-buying scandal.

A report published in The Hindu daily, in partnership with whistleblowing website WikiLeaks on Mar 17 had accused members of the ruling Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government of being involved in vote-buying to win a confidence vote in 2008.

The trust vote, on July 22, 2008, had helped his government pass the historic 2008 Indo-US civil nuclear deal that paved the way for foreign countries to enter the India?s USD 150 billion civilian nuclear energy market, ending its nuclear isolation following the atomic test in 1974.

The deal faced stiff opposition in the country?s parliament over the issue of limiting liability of foreign suppliers that enter the industry and its slow progress frustrated U.S. analysts.

The report published in the newspaper tempered BJP?s attack on the embattled government which is already fighting several corruption cases ranging from the massive telecoms spectrum scandal to the Adarsh Housing scam.

Defying resignation calls from BJP, the main opposition party, Prime Minister Singh questioned the veracity of the claims based on U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks calling them “unverified and unverifiable?.

In wake of the brouhaha, the Tehelka magazine has posted an extensive report, and audio recordings on its website that indicate that it was the BJP that made frantic efforts on the eve of the confidence vote to ensnare Congress and its allies in the entire episode.

The magazine said that based on the tapes that it had procured and the accounts shared by a CNN-IBN TV reporter who had executed a sting operation in 2008 into the case, it was evident that even though the Congress and its allies could be responsible for a cover-up, the scandal was masterminded by the BJP.

According to the report, it was the Hindu nationalist party that had invited the television channel to carry out a sting operation to prove that its MPs were offered cash to use their votes to favour the Congress.

BJP members had then purportedly made desperate attempts to find a “bait” and it was way past 12 midnight that they finally found one.

Also, senior party leaders like Arun Jaitley and L K advani were apparently privy to the deliberate attempt to set up the elaborate exercise, the report claims.

Congress leaders P Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal, who have already indicated the vote-buying episode could have been a fabricated attempt to destabilise the government, said the criminal investigations into the case was on and all aspects of the scandal were being probed.