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India’s Congress Rallies in Show of Defiance Against Modi | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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India’s Congress party president Sonia Gandhi (C), former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (R) and Congress party vice president Rahul Gandhi (C-L) along with other congress senior leaders and supporters arrive at Parliament Street Police Station after participating in the ‘Save Democracy’ March in New Delhi, India, 06 May 2016


NEW DELHI – Indian opposition leaders Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh were detained for a short time following a rally and march to parliament to resist what according to them is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid to destroy democracy. During which thousands of Congress party workers were waving flags and shouting slogans have joined.

It was all organized after the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) raised the heat in parliament accusing the then Congress-led government and party leaders of being involved in receiving bribes for a multi-million dollar deal for 12 choppers from AgustaWestland.

Sonia Gandhi said the Indian National Congress will never bow down before injustice, as Rahul stated that 20 million jobs had been promised by Modi every year by the time on ground the Indian economy had created only 130,000.

Further, after the helicopter gossip took great part in the headlines for the past weeks, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party terminated the rally aiming to distract attention from the scandal.

Congress has rejected accusations from Modi’s allies that Congress leaders were either complicit in, or blocked investigations into, corrupt payments linked to an order of a dozen helicopters from Italy.

A Milan appeals court recently sentenced the former bosses of Finmeccanica and its AgustaWestland unit to jail terms for false accounting and corruption in the $640 million order that was scrapped just before the 2014 general election.

India’s Supreme Court on Friday heard a petition brought by a New Delhi lawyer calling for it to set up a special investigation team to open a judicial probe. It gave the government and India’s Central Bureau of Investigation four weeks to respond.