Congress President should come out clean on chopper scam: Amit Shah

"The Congress President should come out clean," Shah told media.

"Congress is trying to mislead people of this country by raising irrelevant questions over the issue," he said.

As turmoil continued to prevail in Parliament over the AugustaWestland chopper deal, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy had a face-off with Congress members after he made a controversial comment in the Rajya Sabha throwing the house in an  uproar.

Leading the charge  charge from the Centre’s side over the AgustaWestland chopper scam, Swamy said,  "I have no problem with the minority institutions. But Article doesn't promote financing minority institution. You don't know Constitution; you know Italian Constitution," he said -his barb directed at Congress members.

Swamy on Wednesday had named Congress Pesident Sonia Gandhi linking her to the chopper case in which alleged payoffs were made.

An Italian court investigated the contract because Agusta's parent company is Finmeccanica, an Italian defence manufacturer, and decided that vast amounts of bribes were routed to India by company executives to land the deal for 12 VVIP helicopters for about Rs. 3,600 crore.

The deal was cancelled by India in 2014 after the Italians began investigating it, a point the Congress is flashing in its defence along with the fact that AgustaWestland has not been banned by the new government from bidding for new defence deals.

The Congress  made its own demand for a discussion on AgustaWestland demanding to know why the defence manufacturer accused of corruption was taken off a blacklist by the Narendra Modi government.

The Ministry of Defence in a statement on Thursday sought to clarify on certain issues in public discourse regarding  Agusta Westland International Limited (AWIL).

In its note, the ministry said, publicly available information on the procurement of Agusta Westland helicopters clearly shows that the core issue in the matter is corruption.

It also said, "the present Government has taken effective action to bring out the truth and will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case. The time taken is largely because some of the key perpetrators of this misdeed are outside the country."

In certain quarters, questions have been raised on certain trivial technicalities, the note said, which appear to be intended to distract attention from the core issue of corruption.

The ministry said it wanted to highlight some of the facts to put the issue in correct perspective: