Payoff row: Prashant Bhushan now targets Ravi Shankar Prasad

New Delhi: The BJP’s decision to field union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to defend Prime Minister Narendra Modi over Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s corruption attack seems to have misfired.

On Thursday, civil right activist and eminent lawyer, Mr Prashant Bhushan tweeted a “handwritten page” allegedly seized by I-T sleuths during raids at Sahara Group offices regarding payoffs in 2010. Posting a handwritten note showing names of politicians in the alleged payoffs, Mr Bhushan tweeted; “A handwritten pg seized by IT in Sahara raid with payoffs of 2010. Last entry is Rs 1.25cr to R.S. Prasad. BJP should get better person to defend Modi.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi accused the Prime Minister of taking money from the Sahara and Birla groups when he was Gujarat’s chief minister, a charge the ruling BJP strongly refuted.

Mr Gandhi made the allegation while addressing a rally in Gujarat’s Mehsana after he claimed last week that there would be an earthquake if he was allowed to speak in Parliament as he had proof about Mr Modi’s “personal corruption”. While Mr Gandhi demanded an independent probe into the matter, the BJP said these charges were not new and had been debated and refuted for quite some time now.

He had lleged that the I-T department had notings of Sahara officials’ claim that they had paid at least Rs 40 crores in nine installments to the PM between October, 2013 and February, 2014. Mr Prasad on Wednesday had defended PM saying that “Modiji is as pure as the Ganges.”

The alleged I-T note tweeted by Mr Bhushan also had names of Congress leaders like Salman Khursheed and Digvijay Singh.