Campaign against Arun Jaitley will fail: BJP

NEW DELHI: With Opposition escalating its attack, BJP today said the campaign against Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will "fail" in the same manner as their earlier attempts to target its leaders proved futile.

The party also rejected any comparison between the Hawala case against L K Advani and the allegations in the DDCA affair against Jaitley.

The BJP said due to political bitterness Congress was undermining the report of an inquiry done during its own government's time noting that the report had found nothing against Jaitley when he headed the Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA).

It called as "unfortunate" and "condemnable" that Congress continued to disrupt work in Parliament over the "baseless" charges against him.

"The Serious Fraud Investigation Office probe was carried out into these allegations when Congress was in power. It stated that there was no fraud or cheating. Due to political reasons, Congress is ignoring its government's inquiry. It has no moral right to level such a charge," BJP secretary Shrikant Sharma said.

"Congress will suffer embarrassment in its attempts to defame Jaitley in a similar manner it did earlier when it targeted our senior leaders," he said, in a reference to the opposition's attack against Union Minister Sushma Swaraj and chief ministers Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Vasundhara Raje.

BJP also dismissed the attempts by opposition parties to draw a parallel between Hawala charges against L K Advani, who had resigned then, and the allegations against Jaitley, saying there is no criminal case in the DDCA issue and the SFIO inquiry found "no fraud".

First Congress disrupted Parliament over a case in which its leaders are accused of "grabbing" Rs 5000 cr assets by investing only Rs 50 lakh and now they have resorted to levelling false charges against Jaitley to do it, Sharma said.

In a strong show of support for Jaitley, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said at BJP parliamentary party meet that he will come through "with flying colours" against charges of corruption levelled against him by the opposition in a same way Advani did in the Hawala case.