We’ll deal with it, says Rahul

New Delhi: The citizenship row seems to have returned to haunt Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi once again. Gandhi has been asked by the LK Advani-headed Lok Sabha ethics committee to respond to questions on whether he (Gandhi) had once declared himself a British citizen.

According to reports, a show-cause notice was served and was sent to the Congress leader’s office last week. The Congress, however, denied having received any notice. Briefing the media outside the Parliament House on Monday, Rahul Gandhi said, "We'll deal with that." “BJP has a habit to come up with lies; we will respond to this in Parliament,” he added.

"Rahul Gandhi has been issued notice seeking his response on why he declared himself as British citizen. The complaint was received by the Speaker and she has forwarded the same to the Ethics Committee," said Arjun Ram Meghwal, an Ethics Committee member and BJP MP. "I have no idea that notice has been sent to Rahul Gandhi. I have just heard. I thought chairman will tell all of us but it didn't happen. If a complaint is there a letter was sent just to find out the details. This is a matter of procedure. It is politically motivated.

We moved privilege motion against Smriti, so they have done it against Rahul," Congress MP Ninong Ering, an Ethics Committee member, was quoted as saying. Refuting Congress's charges, Meghwal said, "It is a matter of procedure and there is no politics in it. We did not fill the form it was Rahul who said he is British citizen. Why we will do politics? Let him reply."

An ethics committee has the power to expel a lawmaker if discrepancies were proven true. The Congress, however, brushed aside the inquiry as a formality and said that there was no incriminating evidence against Rahul. Congress had called the original complaint, by Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former member of Parliament Subramanian Swamy, a personal vendetta, and alleged that BJP leadership is carrying on this attack.

The dual citizenship controversy engulfed the Congress in November when BJP leader Subramanian Swamy said that he had accessed documents to show that Rahul had claimed British nationality to set up a company in the UK. According to the documents that Swamy alleged that he had, claimed that the Congress vice-president was the director and secretary of the company.

Swamy had said that he had extracted the papers from the company law authorities of Britain. The documents showed that Rahul had called himself "British" on the annual returns of UK-based "Backops Limited" in 2005 and 2006. As a rebuttal to Swamy's allegations, the Congress released another document of the same company, in which Rahul had declared himself as Indian.

The party described the discrepancy as a 'typing error' between the document and the British government's records. Rahul had then rejected the allegations of impropriety and dared Prime Minister Narendra Modi to jail him if he was proven guilty.