Indian-American Congressional candidate accused of mudslinging

An opponent of Manju Goel, a Republican Indian-American Congressional candidate in Illinois, has accused her campaign and supporters of putting up fake web and social media sites to disparage him.

In a letter put out last week, larry Kaifesh, who is opposing Goel in the Republican party's March 18 primary for the 8th Congressional District, accused Goel of taking her "campaign into the gutter", according to Chicago's Courier-News. "In a strange act of desperation, the Indian Americans for Freedom super PAC and their candidate for Illinois' 8th Congressional District, Manju Goel, have taken her campaign into the gutter," it said.

"They have established a fake web site as well as fake Facebook and Twitter accounts in an attempt to manipulate and confuse voters about Colonel larry Kaifesh." The letter states that the web site, larrykaifesh4congress.com, "steals the appearance of Colonel Kaifesh's actual web site but contains false positions on issues and goes so far to allege, falsely, that Colonel Kaifesh is a racist".

However, the Manju Media Team told the Courier-News in response to an email that "Manju for Congress campaign has no knowledge of the web sites mentioned in your email. "We are focused on issue based campaign, and have even invited Kaifesh for debate on issues which he has not responded to so far." Under US law, Super PACs, officially known as "independent-expenditure only committees", can engage in unlimited political spending as long as they don't make contributions to candidate campaigns or parties.

The PAC was formed by Indian-American businessman Shalli Kumar, a supporter of the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. Goel and Kumar have denied any allegations of impropriety, according to the Chicago Tribune. "I haven't done anything illegal and my campaign is squeaky clean," Goel told the newspaper.