The Congress on Thursday said that it will bring a Privilege Motion against External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj for misleading the families of the 39 Indians who died in Mosul, Iraq.
“We are going to bring a Privilege Motion against the External Affairs Minister for misleading the families of the 39 Indians as well as the House,” Ambika Soni, senior Congress leader said.
Earlier in the day, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi had accused the Center of diverting the attention from the tragic death of poor Indian labourers by Islamic State (IS) militants and instead inventing a story on data theft following the Cambridge Analytica revelations.
In a tweet, the Gandhi scion said: “Problem: 39 Indians dead; Govt on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress & Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved.”
Rahul Gandhi’s tweet comes a day after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused the Congress of having links with a political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica that has been accused of stealing data to allegedly influence the electoral process.
The data firm, which has ties to President Donald Trump’s campaign, reportedly accessed information from about 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, CNN reported.
Instead, the Congress accused the BJP of having availed its services in 2010.
The Congress also said that company’s India partner is Ovelina Business Intelligence, which is being run by the son of a JD-U MP, while the LinkedIn profile of Himanshu Sharma, who is the Vice President of OBI, lists achievements like achieving Mission 272+ for the BJP and elections in other states.
On the issue of 39 Indians killed in Mosul, Iraq by the Islamic State, the Congress has demanded that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj must apologise to families of those killed for “misleading” them and giving “false hopes”.
The victims — 31 from Punjab, four from Himachal Pradesh and four from Bihar and West Bengal — were construction workers and were employed by an Iraqi company in Mosul and taken hostage when the IS took control of Iraq’s second largest city in Iraq.