Former MP Sebastian Paul claims was offered Rs 25 cr to vote for UPA govt in 2008
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Kochi: In a shocking admission, former MP Sebastian Paul claims he was offered Rs 25 crore to back the UPA administration led by Manmohan Singh in the 2008 no-confidence motion following the Left front's withdrawal of support for the government due to the Indo-US nuclear deal.
Paul, a Left independent MP in UPA-I from 2004 to 2009, said in an article published for "Samakalika Malayalam," a sister publication of TNIE, that two people had visited his Delhi home (No. 20, Rajendra Prasad Road) while he was alone.
He says they claimed to be Congress leader Pranab Mukherjee's agents, who had been working tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure the UPA administration survived the motion, the New Indian Express reported.
“As an independent MP, the party whip or expulsion under the Anti-Defection Act did not apply to me. They approached me to give a ‘shock’ to the Left front as I was a CPM-backed independent MP. Mukherjee’s emissaries talked to me matter-of-factly. They offered me Rs 25 crore if I voted in the government’s favour,” Paul writes in the weekly, which hits the stands on Friday.
He claims that because the money was so outrageous, he doubted the offer's legitimacy and did not accept it. He was also reminded of the television channel's sting operation a few years prior, in which eleven Members of Parliament were found to have accepted bribes in exchange for asking questions in the legislature.
“It’s always better to be on the vigil against hidden cameras in times such as these,” he writes, tongue-in-cheek. Paul claims that when he saw Vayalar Ravi, a Congress MP and later Parliamentary Affairs Minister, in the central chamber of Parliament, he realised it was not a sting operation.
“Vayalar Ravi, who knew me from my days as a student at Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam, told me that my name had been stuck off the list of MPs identified by Mukherjee who could vote against the motion. There were five independent MPs in the Parliament then. I commanded higher ‘value’ as I was a CPM independent MP. That was why the net was cast on me,” he writes.
Another independent MP at the time was P C Thomas. But after being convicted in an election-related matter, he was denied the right to vote. He was permitted to sit in Parliament by the Supreme Court.
“Such opportunities come only once in a lifetime. Nothing happened to those who took Pranab’s bait or fell in his net,” writes Paul, and added that large sums of money were offered to people who chose not to vote as well as to those who switched sides.
