New Delhi/Kanpur: The Congress Party on Sunday refused to comment on Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde's remark that the coal issue will soon fade away from public memory as had happened in the case of the 1984-85 Bofors controversy.
Congress spokesperson Rashid Alvi said he was not aware of the Union Home Minister's statement.
"I don''t know what Sushilji has said. We will talk to him in this regard, then talk to you," he said.
Another Congress leader Rashid Masood said only Shinde can reveal the motive behind his statement.
"Whenever you erect a building on a wrong foundation, then the building will collapse. ....This only Sushil Kumar Shinde can say what his motive behind this statement was. But I can tell you this much that the common man of this country will forget all things, which is falsely based," he said.
Meanwhile, Union Coal Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal refused to comment on the matter.
"I don't know what he has said," he told mediapersons in Kanpur.
Shinde had on Saturday said that bofors was a talking point earlier, but people forgot about it later.
"Earlier the bofors scam was the hot debate all over the country. Later people forgot it. Now it is coal. This too will be forgotten. Once hands are washed off coal, they again become clean," he added during an interaction in Pune.
The Congress-led UPA Government is at the moment embroiled in a series of scams, the most notably being the coal blocks allocation scam.
The BJP-led opposition disrupted the proceedings in the Monsoon Session of Parliament and deprived the government from putting forth its views on the issue.
The coal scandal dominated the Monsoon Session of Parliament after the CAG report said that the under-priced sales of coalfields would have cost the national exchequer as much as 33 billion dollars in lost revenues.
ANI
First Published: Sunday, September 16, 2012, 14:59