New Delhi: Senior Congress leader and Rajya Sabha MP Abhishek Manu Singhvi on Tuesday accused the ruling BJP of “weaponising investigative agencies” to pursue a political vendetta against the Opposition, calling the latest developments in the National Herald case “a bizarre legal fiction built without evidence, money trail, or offence.”
Singhvi said the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had “conjured a crime where none exists,” alleging that the case was an attempt to harass Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi under the pretext of money laundering. “If justice is blind, the ED is colour-blind — it sees only one colour, the Opposition,” he remarked.
Singhvi explained that the National Herald publisher, Associated Journals Ltd. (AJL), was a decades-old institution founded on ideals of the freedom struggle and supported by the Congress through periodic loans to sustain operations. When those loans reached about Rs 90 crore, the All India Congress Committee (AICC) decided to convert the debt into equity, a routine corporate restructuring by assigning it to Young Indian, a not-for-profit company.
“No money moved, no property changed hands, no profit was made,” Singhvi said. “Yet, the ED’s febrile imagination sees money laundering. This is a case that should feature among the wonders of the legal world.”
He pointed out that the ED’s action was based not on any official complaint but on a private petition filed years ago by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy, one that Swamy himself later stayed in the High Court. “When no predicate offence exists, how can the ED intervene?” Singhvi asked, arguing that the absence of an FIR made the proceedings legally untenable.
Calling the new FIR filed in November “an afterthought to plug a fatal gap,” the Congress leader said the case was evidence of “BJP’s politics of retribution tire out the Opposition, glorify the lie, and set the agencies dancing.”