Rahul slams Modi: What’s shameful is how nation was sold as part of trade deal

A day after PM Narendra Modi slammed the Congress for turning an international event India AI Impact Summit into a venue of its “gandi aur nangi (dirty and shameless)” politics after the Youth Congress’s shirtless protest, Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi hit back saying that the PM has been having “sleepless nights” thinking about the consequences of the case against industrialist Gautam Adani in the US.

Referring to India-US trade deal, Gandhi, in a video statement, alleged it was “shameful” “the way India was sold to the US”. “What you have done with the US is shameful. You have sold the country. The trade deal with the US resulted in India getting nothing… You have sold our data, finished our farmers, ruined our textile industry. This is shameful. The second shameful thing is Epstein who is a paedophile. In his files and emails, your name, your ministers’ names, your friends’ names are coming. This is the second shameful thing,” said Gandhi.

Advertisement

Targeting the PM over fiasco during the first leg of Budget Session over the unpublished memoir of former Army Chief M M Naravane, Gandhi said, “He couldn’t come to Parliament and the reason wasn’t Naravane. The reason was Epstein (files) and the case against (Gautam) Adani.” The third “shameful” thing, he claimed, was case against Adani. “The whole cou­n­try knows it’s not against Ada­ni, but is a case against BJP and your financial architecture.”

BJP national spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari said Gandhi was “a perennial anti-India liar” and asserted “there was no verified document, court record, or official investigation that na­mes” Modi “in any Epstein-related case”. He claimed India-US trade volume had grown from around $74 billion in 2014 to over $190 billion in recent years.