Congress asks Asaram defender Salman Khurshid to condemn Finance Minister Arun Jaitley remark

NEW DELHI: The wide-spread public protests from civil society and Congress-led Opposition forced Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to express regret for his statement that a “one small incident of rape” had hit tourist inflow to India. But soon after, the Congress high command too scored a political self-goal when it fielded senior party leader Salman Khurshid, defence lawyer of Asaram Bapu, an undertrail in a rape case, to condemn Jaitley’s remarks and ridicule the NDA establishment for the ‘moral gap’ between what “it preaches and practices”.

When media persons pointed out to Khurshid, a former Congress law minister, that he was now defending a rape accused in the Supreme Court and that it was the former Congress government in Rajasthan headed by Ashok Gehlot that had arrested and jailed the accused, Khursheed, unlike Jaitley, expressed no regret or remorse. He insisted that the media had no right to question “his professional capacity” and asserted that his “political life” should be treated separately.

Before Khusrhid landed up at the Congress press conference to attack Jaitley’s controversial remarks, the Congress leadership had begun the day on a dramatic note by unleashing its fire-power against Jaitley’s “shameful remarks” and NDA government’s “shocking moral double standards” on a sensitive social issues like incidents of rape and increasing crime against women.