Rafale deal: After Arun Jaitley's Facebook post, Congress demands inquiry by joint parliamentary panel on fight jet pact

Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari on Wednesday demanded that a joint parliamentary panel investigate the Rafale fighter jet deal. Tewari also questioned whether the air force had conducted a re-evaluation when in 2012-2015, the negotiations stopped.

We would like to ask the govt, between 2012-2015, when the negotiations stopped and govt decided to go ahead in our base of 36 aircrafts, was a re-evaluation conducted by Air Force?: @ManishTewari#ModiAmbaniRafaleScam

— Congress Live (@INCIndiaLive) August 29, 2018

Tewari also attacked the government on the subjects demonetisation, the arrests of social activists on Tuesday and the falling rupee. He raised the question on the Rafale deal after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley released a statement, in which he attacked Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, saying he was not aware of the price of the jets to make comparisons with the deals negotiated by the UPA and NDA and misquoted the prices of each jet multiple times. The Bharatiya Janata Party had released a video of Rahul quoting multiple prices of the jets earlier this month. Earlier on Wednesday, Jaitley had accused the Congress of “peddling untruth” on the Rafale aircraft deal, saying the “false campaign” by the Opposition party and Rahul was seriously compromising national security. In a Facebook blogpost, the finance minister posed 15 questions to Gandhi and said the deal the NDA government had entered into with France on 10 April, 2015, to procure 36 Rafale fighter jets was on “better” terms than the one the UPA government had negotiated in 2007. With inputs from PTI