NEW DELHI: A day after three Congress MLAs were intercepted by Howrah police in West Bengal, allegedly with huge cash, the Congress on Sunday suspended them from the party and accused the BJP of trying to topple its coalition government in Jharkhand.
Later on in the day, the Howrah Rural Police formally arrested them along with two other individuals intercepted with the Congress MLAs. The investigation was handed over to CID for Probe.
Addressing a press conference at the party headquarters in New Delhi on Sunday, the party’s Jharkhand in-charge Avinash Pande said, “Congress president Sonia Gandhi has suspended the three MLAs with immediate effect.”
The action came a day after the West Bengal Police acting on a tip-off intercepted an SUV in which Congress MLAs Irfan Ansari, Rajesh Kachchap and Naman Bixal Kongari were travelling on national highway-16 at Ranihati in Howrah and allegedly found a huge amount of cash in the vehicle.
Ansari is the MLA of Jamtara, while Kachchap is the legislator of Khijri in Ranchi district and Kongari is the MLA of Kolebira in Simdega district.
Following the recovery of huge cash from the vehicle of the MLAs in which they were travelling, Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh in a tweet said, “The BJP’s ‘Operation Lotus’ in Jharkhand stands exposed tonight in Howrah. The game plan of ‘Hum Do’ in Delhi is to do in Jharkhand what they did in Maharashtra by installing E-D duo.”
Speaking at the press conference, Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera said, “Please let’s stop calling it Operation Lotus. It’s Operation Kamal.”
Khera alleged that the BJP was making an effort to topple the democratically elected governments. “The way democracy is being razed today, it will be written in black letters in history. Today there is an open conspiracy going on in the country to destabilize the democratically elected governments,” he said.
The Congress leader, lamenting the BJP said that it had led similar attempts in Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. “Now, they are eyeing Jharkhand,” he said.
Hitting out the government at the Centre, he said, “The government has a function due to which it is brought to power. It is not the government’s job to think about how to come to power at the place of work where he has lost the election. (Narendra) Modi Ji and Amit Shah Ji may not understand this thing.”