New Delhi: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) Supremo Asaduddin Owaisi on Saturday sought for an explanation from Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman over the Rafale fighter jet deal controversy.

The demand by Owaisi comes in the backdrop of former French President Francois Hollande’s claim that it was actually the Indian government who proposed Reliance Defence as the partner for Dassault Aviation for Rafale jet deal and he had got nothing to do with it.

Owaisi speaking to news agencies when he asked, “The people of India want to know who is lying. Is the French ex-President lying or our Prime Minister Modi is not saying the truth?”

“We want the Defence Minister to throw light on this,” he added.

The controversy of Rafale fighter jet deal took a new turn on Friday when Hollande claimed that Narendra Modi’s government in India was responsible for proposing Anil Ambani’s name for the deal. Mr. Hollande was the president of France from 2012 to 2017.

“We did not have a say in that. The Indian government proposed this service group, and Dassault negotiated with Ambani. We did not have a choice, we took the interlocutor we were given,” Hollande was quoted by a French Journal, Mediapart.

Owaisi took this opportunity to criticize Anil Ambani by reason and said, “The ex-president of France says that the absurd contract was given on the condition of the Prime Minister of India that they will finalize this deal only if you give this absurd contract to ‘X’ person. The whole world knows who the X person is who has never manufactured even a single tyre leave aside aircraft or a motorcycle.”

Hollande, in his statement, has said that the Indian government has given no choice to the Dassault Aviation except to partner with Anil Ambani-led Reliance Defence for the offset clause in the Rafale fighter jet deal.

The Rafale fighter jets were selected to be inducted in the Indian Air Force as a part of modernization and up-gradation of its systems and weaponry during the regime of United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the year 2012. At the start of the deal, India proposed to buy 18 off-the-shelf jets from France, with 108 to be assembled in the country itself by the Indian government owned aerospace and Defence company HAL.

When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power at the centre to form the government, it nullified the UPA’s plan in the year 2015 and announced that it would go with its own plan of buying 36 “ready-to-fly” Rafale jets instead of pressing for UPA’s technology transfer clause from Dassault Aviation of France and manufacturing the rest in India.

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