Alleging that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and other agencies were “continuously harassing” the vendors who provided service to his daughter’s wedding held in November last year, Shiv Sena MP and spokesperson Sanjay Raut has charged the harassment suffered by the decorators and other vendors concerned as a “direct attack” on his right to speak freely in Rajya Sabha and outside the Upper House.
In a letter shot off to chairman of Rajya Sabha and vice president of India Venkaiah Naidu on Tuesday, Raut said: “my daughter gor married on 29th November 2021. The ED and other agency personnel are summoning, intimidating and threatening the decorators and other vendors of the wedding event so as to extract statements from them that they received Rs 50 lakh from me in cash. On refusal by these people to partake in such an endeavour, the ED and other agencies are continuously harassing them”.
Raut, who is the Shiv Sena Parliamentary Party leader, said that the ED and other agencies had so far “wrongly confined” 28 persons as part of the alleged witch-hunt being carried out against him. He said that the ED and other agencies had not only “confined” the 28 persons for hours together in its office, but had also gone to the extent of “threatening” these people that if they do not give a statement to the ED and other agencies, they would be arrested. “The ED and other agency personnel who are tasked with the duty to protect revenue and secure proceeds of the crime are now reduced to puppets of their political masters. In fact, the personnel from the ED and other agencies even confessed to the very people they are summoning that they have been asked by their bosses to fix me,” Raut wrote in his letter to Naidu.
Maintaining that he was not scared nor was he going to bow down (to the Government). “I will continue to speak the truth, both in the House and outside the House. However, the Government using agencies like the ED and other agencies to harass my family members, friends, relatives and even those people who are not concerned with me speaks volumes of the “decay in our system”.
Raut said that as a Rajya Sabha member, he had the right as well the duty guaranteed by the Constitution to speak in the House. “As a citizen, I have the right to speak outside the House. I have the right to question the Government, its policies, decisions and right to dissent. I have the right to make alliances which will democratically fight what we all perceive to be against the state/national interest,” he said.
Raut, whose Shiv Sena severed its links with the BJP and aligned with the Congress and NCP to form the MahaVikas Aghadi (MVA) government in Maharashtra in November 2019, said: “We have a right to have our own ideology which may necessarily in tandem with the political power in power at the Centre. However, that does not mean that our legislators, MPs, their family members, friends and acquaintances are threatened and harassed under the garb of conducting investigations and even arrested in cases of alleged money laundering”.
“However, transactions which are decades old and have nothing to with the money laundering are taken to investigations with the oblique and ulterior motive of harassing and terrorising political opponents in the name of conducting investigation by ED and other central agencies,” he said. Raut urged the vice President “not just take note of the abuse of power to perpetuate intimidation and harassment on members of the Rajya Sabha but also to speak up and take action”.
Raut signed off his letter with the famed poem penned by the anti-Nazi German pastor Martin Niemoller who did not speak out against the Nazi rule at the right time and wrote confessional people as a token of poem that read thus: “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a communist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me”.
