Congress asks for evidence on Wal-Mart lobbying

NEW DELHI: Criticising the BJP for disrupting the House to score "brownie points", union minister Manish Tewari said on Tuesday that the party should make public any evidence it has on Wal-Mart lobbying in the US to open the way for foreign equity in retail trade in India.

"If the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) or anybody else has any evidence it should have been made public. Those allegations should have been verified," the information and broadcasting minister told reporters.

Tewari was reacting to the report that Wal-Mart had spent Rs 125 crore on lobbying activities in the US, including on issues related to enhanced market access for investment in India. The issue saw the BJP stalling proceedings in both houses of parliament Tuesday.

"Merely because a report gets published somewhere and it serves your political purpose, it ducktales into your larger agenda because you've lost the FDI vote in both the Houses that does not mean that you translate conjuncture into innuendo and extrapolate innuendo into allegations," he said.

"The BJP has developed a very strange operational methodology, first you make an allegation, then you reiterate the allegation and then you start believing in your own allegation. Before an allegation is made, the facts and circumstances should be verified in their entirety," he added.

He said stalling parliament was not in the interest of the country. "This is what the BJP has been doing in the last three years."

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