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Supreme Court bench comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices S K Kaul and K M Joseph heard the petitions seeking a court-monitored investigation into the Rafale defence deal. The arguments were started by Advocate M L Sharma, who submitted that the details handed over the Government revealed “serious fraud” in the deal. He pointed out that negotiation between India and France regarding the deal commenced in May 2015, only after the deal was announced by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April 2015. The deal was approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security only in March 2016, almost a year after its announcement by the PM.
Next was the turn of lawyer for Sanjay Singh, Rajya Sabha MP of AAP. He submitted that the deal between Dassault and HAL for manufacture of 108 aircraft domestically was alive even as on March 2015; however, suddenly the deal was revised during PM’s visit to France in April 2015 and the number of jets were reduced to 36. The Government had disclosed the pricing details of the deal in the Parliament twice. The cost per aircraft is substantially higher than the earlier deal, even though the equipments remain the same. The Government has stated in its documents that the new deal was necessitated to augment combat potential. Then, how does it seem logical to cut down the number of jets from 126 to 36, asked the council.
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