Rejecting the Congress Party's charge that the NDA Government had ordered snooping on party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Monday that the latter was simply making a "mountain out of what is not even a molehill", and added that what was undertaken by the Delhi Police was a routine transparent security profiling of the 526 VIPs that live in the Lutyens area of the national capital.
Countering the Congress and the Samajwadi Party in the Rajya Sabha, Jaitley, who is the Leader of the House, said the police has been collecting such information since 1957, and added that the proforma for profiling of VIPs has been amended twice-once in 1987 and again in 1998-99.
He said that the proforma was used to profile former prime ministers H D Dewa Gowda, I K Gujral, Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1999. The same was also used to profile Congress President Sonia Gandhi in October 2004, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012,he added.
He also revealed that Pranab Mukherjee before becoming the President, was profiled in 2001, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2012, while senior BJP leaders L K Advani and Sushma Swaraj, Ahmed Patel of Congress, CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury and Sharad Yadav of JD-U were also profiled.
"526 persons have been profiled using the present form," he said, adding this was part of "transparent, security profiling and not associated with any kind of snooping or sypying."
"It is not that it has been started in the last 8 months," he said and proposed to sit with Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad to go through the 526 forms filled during the previous UPA rule.
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On the proforma seeking information on shoe size, colour of eyes and other such information, Jaitley said former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was identified by his shoes after his assassination.
Security needs and profiling should be left to security experts and "we should not attempt to become one", he said.