Ram Jethmalani attacks PM Modi: 'BJP will face same poll drubbing like Bihar'

New Delhi, Apr 29: BJP will face the same electoral drubbing across the country that it had in Bihar, former Union minister and legal luminary Ram Jethmalani claimed today while launching a scathing attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for "not fulfilling" his key poll promise of bringing back black money stashed abroad.

Alleging that Modi has no intention of bringing back the illegal wealth from foreign countries, he vowed to fight with all his "might" to pursue the matter. "Modi fooled me. He had no intention to bring back black money.

See what happened to BJP and Modi in Bihar. This will happen to them all over the country," the veteran lawyer told reporters.

Jethmalani also wondered why the NDA government has not "shown" any interest in getting details of people having black money in foreign banks when the German government had offered to share the information it had acquired.

"Modi misguided even me. He had told me that Rs 90 lakh crore had been stolen from poor people of India and was kept in foreign banks. He said in his election rallies that he will give each citizen Rs 15 lakh after bringing back the amount.

I believed in him because I have been fighting against black money at the Supreme Court since 2009," said Jethmalani.

He said the German government had procured details of 1400 bank accounts through an employee of Liechtenstein bank and that Swiss Bankers Association had announced that most of these account holders were Indians.

"All governments approached Germany but no one (from India) went there except me. I was told by the German government that Indian government had not sought any information about the account holders. "BJP president Amit Shah even said that the talk of bringing back black money during election was gimmick," he said.

Jethmalani said following a Supreme Court order in 2011, he received 17 letters relating to correspondence between Indian and German government about the issue but names of the letter writers and recipients were smeared with indelible ink.

"I found out that the correspondence was not with German government but with a small tax office concerned with double taxation avoidance treaty... They had corresponded with that office and not with the German government. Even that correspondence was stopped in 2009.

"I said to them that we will go to the court and they will be sent to the jail for the forgery of removing names from the list. The letters were written when P Chidambaram was Finance Minister. But Arun Jaitley suppressed that correspondence. In 2014 I got those letters," claimed Jethmalani.

PTI

PTI