Veteran BJP leader and former finance minister, Yashwant Sinha on Wednesday said that the defence of Jay Shah, son BJP President Amit Shah, by the saffron party was indicative of lapses on several fronts.
Speaking in Patna, Sinha said, “The way the loan was given to Jai Shah by the Power Ministry and the way (minister) Piyush Goyal defended him, it gives the impression that there’s something wrong. Even Additional Solicitor General (Tushar Mehta) representing a private individual in court is something that never happened before.”
Jay Shah hit media headlines earlier this week after The Wire website claimed that the turnover of the company owned by Jay Shah had soared 16,000 times since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister. He’s since slapped a defamation case seeking damages of Rs 100 crore from the website and six journalists responsible for publishing the report.
“The government should order an inquiry because too many government departments are involved. The BJP has lost the high moral ground of zero tolerance on corruption,” he was quoted by NDTV.
The government ASG had said that he sought and obtained clearance from the law minsitry to represent Jay Shah, who’s a private citizen.
Sinha had last month had slammed his own government’s economic policies by accusing them of causing an economic chaos in the country.
Writing in the The Indian Express, Sinha, who held the finance portfolio in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, said that he will be failing in his ‘national duty’ if he did not ‘speak up’ now against the ‘mess the finance minister has made of economy.’
He wrote, “The Prime Minister claims that he has seen poverty from close quarters. His finance minister is working over time to make sure that all Indians also see it from equally close quarters.”
He had particularly singled out Finance Minister Arun Jaitley by mocking his appointment into the Modi government as an important minister despite losing Lok Sabha elections from Amritsar in 2014.
He wrote, “Arun Jaitley is considered to be the best and the brightest in this government. It was a foregone conclusion before the 2014 elections that he would be the finance minister in the new government. His losing his Lok Sabha election from Amritsar was not allowed to come in the way of this appointment. One may recall that in similar circumstances Atal Bihari Vajpayee had refused to appoint Jaswant Singh and Pramod Mahajan, two of his closest colleagues in the party, to his cabinet in 1998.”