NEW DELHI/JAIPUR, Jun 27: Embattled Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje returned to Jaipur after taking part in NITI Aayog deliberations in Delhi today without meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi or BJP chief Amit Shah triggering speculation that the party top brass wanted to avoid her.
Raje, who is embroiled in the Lalit Modi controversy, arrived in the national capital from Jaipur at around 9.30 AM and returned by a special plane in the afternoon after over four hours.
BJP sources insisted that a meeting of the Prime Minister or the BJP President with Raje during her visit to the national capital was never discussed. They also said the two top party leaders did not meet most of the BJP chief ministers who were in Delhi for the meeting.
Amid speculation that Raje would meet BJP top brass in Delhi to personally give her version of events, her office today said she was not scheduled to meet anyone but had gone there only to attend a meeting of NITI Ayog.
The CMO, in a statement in Jaipur, said after attending the NITI Ayog meeting she had come back directly to Jaipur.
Raje gave media the slip after the NITI Aayog meeting.
Even as a large media contingent was waiting at the gate from which she had had entered, Raje’s cavalcade left from the rear gate.
The BJP yesterday backed Raje in the face of the opposition’s demand that she quit over her links with tainted former IPL boss Lalit Modi.
Raje, who has been facing mounting Congress pressure to quit in connection with the ‘Lalitgate’, seems to have secured the central leadership’s backing for now.
Last night, after a meeting between Modi and Shah, party sources indicated that the top leadership of the party had accepted Raje’s defence in the controversy.
Unfazed by the mounting Congress demand for Raje’s resignation, the BJP continued to defend the Chief Minister with its spokesman Sudhanshu Trivedi asserting that there is “no substance” in the rival party’s allegations.
Congress took a swipe at Narendra Modi over the row, accusing him of following “Raje dharma” and “not raj dharma” by shielding the Rajasthan Chief Minister and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who had also helped Lalit Modi in obtaining travel papers from Britain.
Hitting back, BJP secretary Shrikant Sharma said Congress is raking up “baseless charges” against its leaders and alleged that the opposition party is a symbol of “corruption and commission”. “BJP Government does not have to learn ‘raj dharma’ from a party as tainted as Congress,” he said.
In Jaipur, civil rights groups held protests, demanding Raje’s resignation
BJP sources said last night that the party’s top brass agreed with Raje’s defence over the twin charges facing her.
She told the party that the document showing her to have signed an affidavit to support Lalit Modi’s immigration application to the UK Government was a “draft” and never aquired a legal status as she had “backed out of it later and never deposed before a British court”, sources said.
On the allegation that the tainted cricket czar, who is accused of laundering money over Rs 700 cr, invested in her son’s company and she owned shares in it, she said all transaction were reported before the authorities and are legal. (PTI)
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