Statement issued byShri L.K. Advani, Leader of the Opposition (Lok Sabha) At a press conference in Mumbai : April 10, 2006

• Latest revelations on the Volker report scam show that the taint is spreading far beyond Shri Natwar Singh.
• CBI must probe Natwar Singh and the Congress party -- and Congress president must be questioned -- for their involvement in the oil-for-food scam.
• Congress and communists have besmirched the reputation of Indian democracy with their culture of taking foreign funds.
  Gujarat under the leadership of Shri Narendra Modi is a model of Good Governance and Development for other states

In my press conference in New Delhi on April 4, jointly with my party president Shri Rajnath Singh, I had stated that the message of the Bharat Suraksha Yatra was five-fold: is five-fold: To safeguard National Security -- from jehadi terrorism and left-wing extremism; To defend National Unity -- from the divisive politics of minorityism, and especially from the large-scale illegal immigration from Bangladesh; To rescue Governance -- from corruption and criminalization in high places; To save Parliamentary Democracy -- from institutional misuse, revival of authoritarianism of the Emergency era, and Congress party’s fake culture of "sacrifice"; To protect the Economic Security of the Aam Aadmi, Garib and Kisans -- from the assaults of massive price rise, unemployment and debt.

It may be recalled that when the UPA government came to office in May 2004, the very first issue that the BJP, along with other constituents of the NDA, took up was that of tainted ministers in the new government. We approached the Rashtrapati with a memorandum listing the heinous crimes – ranging from murder, kidnapping, extortion and corruption -- in which at least half a dozen ministers in the UPA government were involvement.

We did not then expect that in less than two years, two more senior ministers – holding the important portfolios of external affairs and defense – would be involved in major corruption scandals. I have already commented upon the "War Room Leak" and the huge kickbacks scandal in the Rs. 18,978-crore Scorpene submarine deal, increasingly being referred to as the "Navy’s Bofors". I will have more to say on this matter at a later stage during my Yatra. Today my remarks will be focused on the latest revelations in the Volker scandal.

The involvement of Shri Natwar Singh, who had to quit as the external affairs minister in the wake of the Volker report mentioning him and the Congress party as "non-contractual beneficiaries" in Iraq’s oil-for-food scam, is now substantiated by further documentary proof. He is reported to have written at least three letters to Iraqi authorities citing the fraternal links between the Congress party and Saddam Hussein’s Baath party to seek benefits under Iraq’s oil-for-food programme.

The involvement of several other well-connected Congressmen – for example, Arvind Khanna, a Congress MLA from Punjab -- has come to light. Thus, the taint is spreading, in spite of the best efforts of the Congress party and the government to contain it.

Section 4 (i) of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act clearly states that "no foreign contribution shall be accepted by any political party or an officer of a political party". Hence, both on moral and political grounds, Congress president Shrimati Sonia Gandhi owes an explanation to the Nation on two counts:

1) Did Shri Natwar Singh write letters to Iraqi authorities without her knowledge and prior consent?

2) Why has she still not broken her silence on the Congress party too being separately mentioned by the Volker report as a beneficiary in the scandal? Is it because the Congress party, having made Shri Natwar Singh a scapegoat, wants to put a lid on its own involvement in the scandal?

So far only Congress party spokesmen been fielded to comment on this matter. We know that their initial denial of Shri Natwar Singh’s involvement was subsequently proved wrong. In fact, Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh was the first person to give a clean chit to his external affairs minister. But no one so far has satisfactorily answered the important question: Why at all should the name of the Congress party be there in the Volker Report in the first place?

In the wake of the Volker Report, whose contents have been vindicated by subsequent findings by the investigative agencies and the media, the BJP demands that a case must be immediately registered by the CBI against Shri Natwar Singh and the Congress party under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act and the Prevention of Corruption Act. This alone will enable the CBI to send letters rogatory to Swiss and other foreign governments to track the money trail and pinpoint the end beneficiaries in the food-for-oil scam. Investigating agencies should also question the Congress president in the course of their probe.

The Volker Report is only a latest edition in the Congress party’s long and unedifying record of taking money from foreign sources. Here are a few examples from the past.

• KGB funds to Congress party:Former KGB senior archivist Vasili Mitrokhin has written in "The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World" that the Soviet spy agency had bought secrets from Indian Cabinet ministers and paid them retainers. Mitrokhin quotes then KGB Gen. Olef Kalugnin as describing India as "a model for the infiltration of a third world government".

  "On at least one occasion a secret gift of two million rupees (then about $250,000) from Moscow to the Congress was personally delivered after midnight," Mitrokhin wrote. "Another million rupees were given on the same occasion to a newspaper which supported Mrs. Gandhi." According to Mitrokhin’s book, the KGB also had subsidized the election campaigns of 21 politicians, including four Cabinet ministers, in national polls, besides giving liberal funds to the Communist Party of India on a regular basis.
• Hawala funds to Congress party: In March 1996, the Income Tax Department, after completing the assessments of various political parties, found that the Congress was the only one to have received foreign donations. The Congress party received Rs. 3.5 crore from abroad between 1993 and 1995, when P.V. Narasimha Rao was the Congress president and Sitaram Kesri was its treasurer. The monies were widely believed to have been laundered by foreign sources.
• CIA funds to Congress party: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former US ambassador in Delhi, had mentioned two occasions when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had paid money to the Congress party. The first was in 1959, when the party engineered the downfall of the Communist government in Kerala headed by EMS Namboodiripad. The second was in 1969, at the time of a split in the Congress party.