Drop Natwar, BJP writes to PM

Stepping up its offensive, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) today demanded that External Affairs Minister K Natwar Singh should be removed from the Cabinet for allegedly being a non-contractual beneficiary in the United Nations' oil-for-food programme for Iraq.

In a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the BJP demanded that criminal cases be registered against all those whose names had figured in the Volcker report, and their passports be impounded to prevent them from fleeing the country.

The letter, written by BJP General Secretary Arun Jaitley, said the continuation of a person indicted as a "lobbyist" by a UN body as external affairs minister was untenable.

"It is bad enough that the minister who represents India in world affairs is implicated in a murky international scandal. What compounds the offence is that he continues to remain the external affairs minister with your full backing," Jaitley said in the letter to the Prime Minister.

The Volcker committee, appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan last year to probe into the administration and management of the $64 billion programme, had listed Singh and the Congress as "non-contractual beneficiaries".

The BJP letter goes on to list a series of coincidences that substantiate Singh's involvement in the scandal. The series of coincidences includes the observation made in the Volcker report that $748,540 were collected by Masefield AG as illegal surcharge and deposited by Andleeb Sehgal and his company, Hamadan Export, into accounts in the Jordan National Bank.

Another set of coincidences, mentioned in the letter, was that Singh and his son, Jagat Singh, were in Iraq when the deals were being negotiated and that Sehgal and Jagat Singh were close friends and travelled to Jordan together at the time when those payments were made.

"There is enough prima facie evidence for you to review your initial clean chit to Natwar Singh," Jaitley said. Earlier, the BJP had attacked the Prime Minister for giving a clean chit to "tainted" ministers including Lalu Prasad and Singh.

The BJP plans to mount the pressure on the United Progressive Alliance government to force Singh's resignation. "More senior leaders including former Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and BJP chief LK Advani will raise the issue," said a BJP office-bearer.