NEW DELHI // India’s foreign minister Sushma Swaraj has come under fire for helping a disgraced cricket administrator obtain travel documents, despite the government having suspended his passport.
The scandal marks the first major stain on prime minister Narendra Modi’s government, a year after he came to power by promising to wipe out crony capitalism perpetuated by the previous, Congress-led government.
A report published by the Sunday Times in London revealed that Ms Swaraj last July assisted Lalit Modi, the former chairman of the Indian Premier League (IPL), in securing travel papers to visit Portugal, where his wife was receiving treatment for cancer.
Mr Modi has been living in London since 2010, after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) began to investigate him for financial irregularities in the multibillion-dollar IPL. His Indian passport was revoked in March 2011 but restored in August last year when the Delhi high court ruled that the ED’s investigation was “extraneous and irrelevant” and should not have led to the suspension of Mr Modi’s passport”.
An Interpol “blue notice” – authorising the international police body to collect information about a person’s location and activities – has been out on Mr Modi since 2010.
To help Mr Modi travel to Portugal without his passport last July, Ms Swaraj reached out to Keith Vaz, the British Labour parliamentarian, to intercede with the United Kingdom’s department of immigration, the Sunday Times said.
“He told me that he had to be present in the hospital to sign the consent papers” for his wife’s treatment, Ms Swaraj said on Twitter on Sunday.
“Taking a humanitarian view, I conveyed ... that British government should examine the request of Lalit Modi as per British rules and regulations.”
“What benefit did I pass on to Lalit Modi – that he could sign consent papers for surgery of his wife suffering from Cancer?” she tweeted.
“He was in London. After his wife’s surgery, he came back to London. What is it that I changed?”
Portuguese law, however, does not require Mr Modi to be present to give written consent for his wife’s treatment.
Ms Swaraj also did not reveal that her daughter Bansuri, a lawyer, represented Mr Modi last year in his lawsuit against the government challenging the revocation of his passport.
To another charge made by the Sunday Times report – that Mr Modi had helped Ms Swaraj’s nephew gain admission to Sussex University in the UK in 2013 – Ms Swaraj argued that it had happened “one year before I became a Minister”.
The Congress party was quick to pounce on the revelations made by the Sunday Times.
On Monday, Rahul Gandhi, the vice-president of the Congress, called for Ms Swaraj to be removed from her post.
“There is only one man running the country and the government. That’s Mr Narendra Modi,” Mr Gandhi said. “Mr Modi should sack Sushma Swaraj.”
“For a prime minister who single-handedly runs the external affairs ministry, it is hard for us to believe that he did not know that active help was being extended to Lalit Modi,” Randeep Surjewala, a Congress spokesperson, said on Monday. “The entire ... government is involved in aiding and abetting a fugitive perhaps with the tacit approval of the prime minister.”
But the prime minister, his cabinet and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have come out strongly to defend Ms Swaraj.
“We want to make it clear that whatever she has done is right,” Rajnath Singh, the home minister, said on Sunday. “We justify it and the government completely stands by her.”
He argued that Ms Swaraj had urged Mr Vaz to only deal with Mr Modi’s case as was permitted by British law, and that “any person with a humanitarian approach” would have done the same.
On Monday, Mr Modi’s lawyer Mehmood Abdi, said that Ms Swaraj’s assistance to his client “was no scandal at all”.
“Now people who are talking about impropriety should introspect,” Mr Abdi said. “Which court has declared Modi an offender? He has been staying [in London] with the knowledge of everybody in the United Kingdom.”
“The Blue Corner notice is issued to know [the] whereabouts of a person,” Mr Abdi said. “From the day [Mr Modi] went to England, he had kept everyone informed. What was the need for a Blue Corner notice?”
On Tuesday, however, an ED official told reporters that Mr Modi will soon be served with a notice to pay penalties for violating India’s foreign exchange regulations. The amount has not yet been disclosed. He is also under investigation for another money laundering case, the official said.
ssubramanian@thenational.ae