New Delhi: Mahua Moitra, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP from Krishnangar, West Bengal, was expelled from the Lok Sabha soon after a debate that lasted merely a little over 30 minutes on Friday (December 8).Both Congress and TMC MPs alleged that the matter of her expulsion was taken up in a hurry, as the ethics committee report, recommending her expulsion for “unethical conduct,” “breach of privilege,” and “contempt of the House” in an alleged “cash-for-query” case, was provided to them only around noon on Friday.Amidst a stormy session on Friday, Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury complained that the matter should be postponed as it was virtually impossible for them to carefully read the 495-page report in merely two hours. Other opposition MPs demanded the same, even as Moitra was not allowed by the speaker Om Birla to defend herself in the lower house.After her expulsion, Moitra said that the ethics committee had no power to recommend punishment to an MP, and alleged that the committee was biased against her for her audacity to question the alleged nexus between the Union government and the Adani Group. On the other hand, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs aggressively defended the committee, with one Lok Sabha member after another reining in to reiterate the findings of its report on Moitra.Between allegations and counter-allegations hurled at each other, a closer look at the report, however, points towards three critical flaws in the way the committee drew its conclusion to recommend Moitra’s expulsion from the Lok Sabha.Also read: ‘Beginning of the End, Will Fight You for the Next 30 Years’: Moitra Fires at BJP After ExpulsionFirst and foremost, the committee curiously chose to ignore the obvious paradox between the allegations made by Jai Anant Dehadrai, Moitra’s former partner and advocate, whose complaint prompted BJP MP Nishikant Dubey to take the matter to the speaker, and Darshan Hiranandani, who later backed many of Dehadrai’s allegations in an affidavit to the ethics committee.Dehadrai, in a detailed complaint, alleged that Moitra accepted bribes in the form of “cash” and “gifts” from industrialist Hiranandani to ask questions, seeking information on the Adani Group, a rival industrial conglomerate. He said that out of the 61 questions the TMC MP asked in the lower house, 50 were related to the Adani Group with an intent to further “Shri Hiranandani’s personal agenda of profit and business rivalry”.Dehadrai mentions an instance, too, when Hiranandani got “extremely agitated to the point of irritation, at the loss of a large energy-related contract in Bengal with a French energy corporation to the Adani Group”, adding that he “specifically instructed” Moitra to target the Adani Group “to the point of embarrassment so that he could pressure the government into restoring contracts back to himself.”However, Hiranandani in his affidavit claims that he first met Moitra in 2017 during the Bengal Global Business Summit, following which they became friends.Hiranandani claims that he found her to be “knowledgeable, expressive, and outspoken”, “a bright intellectual and one of the public representatives that thoroughly understands both the economy and business matters. However, he adds that after she became an MP, her ambitions knew no bounds and she wanted to “quickly make a name for herself at the national level”. That “victory was transformational,” he says.As “their interactions grew over time”, he says, she started asking for odds and ends which “involved” his time. He said she would expect him to “drop everything” and facilitate her immediately. He adds that she was advised by her friends and advisors that the quickest “route to fame is by personally attacking” Prime Minister Narendra Modi.“As was her wont, she thought that the only way to attack Shri Modi is by attacking Shri Gautam Adani and his group, as both were contemporaries, and they belong to the same state of Gujarat,” Hiranandani says in his affidavit.Herein lies the catch. Dehadrai alleges that Moitra, in a quid pro quo conduct, asked questions regarding the Adani Group at the behest of Hiranandani and even took bribes from him. But Hiranandani alleges, in contrast, that Moitra asked questions not at his behest but to further her own political ambitions.Hiranandani suggests that he was compelled to assist Moitra due to his friendship with her. At the same time, he says that Moitra was supported in her endeavour to attack Adani by journalists like Sucheta Dalal, Shardul Shroff, Pallavi Shroff, and possibly international journalists from BBC, Financial Times, The New York Times with whom she had frequent interactions.Hiranandani says that “over a period of time” in being forced to help her to attack Adani, he expected some business contracts in opposition-ruled states.Only one of these versions could be true. However, the committee’s report appears to have relied solely on Dehadrai’s complaint, and ignored Hiranandani’s allegations, before recommending her expulsion.Any attempt to get to the truth of the matter is absent in the report. Instead, the report only notes, “The Committee has also taken cognizance the allegation made by the complainant to the effect that Smt. Moitra asked approximately 50 questions, out of total 61, posted by her which shockingly seek information, with the intent of protecting or perpetuating business interests of Shri Darshan Hiranandani and his company.”Secondly, the committee also took into cognizance of the bribery allegations against Moitra. However, in this aspect, too, it has ignored crucial incongruities in the details given by Dehadrai and Hiranandani.Let us take into account Dehadrai’s account. Among the “gifts” that Dehadrai alleged that Moitra has taken from Hiranandani were “iPhones, diamond and emerald jewellery, luxury items such as scarves from Hermes and Louis Vuitton, about 35 pairs of shoes from Salvatore Ferragamo, dozens of bottles of expensive French and Italian wines, packets of luxury cosmetics from Dubai, bags from Gucci and crocodile leather bags from Berluti, regular delivery of packets of cash both in Indian Rupees and Pound Sterling, payment of salary to staff members on her rolls, extensive designing and technical support from the Mumbai Hiranandani construction department for building” her official residence.As far as “cash”-based kickbacks are concerned, Dehadrai alleges that he overheard a conversation between the two on the payment of Rs 75 lakh, “presumably for election expenses” prior to 2019 Lok Sabha polls, and another one regarding a payment of Rs 2 crore, which was paid by Hiranandani to Moitra in May 2021 to target Gautam Adani and the prime minister in both the Lok Sabha and international press.Hiranandani’s affidavit doesn’t confirm any of the two cash transactions. He merely says that the TMC MP allegedly kept making demands for favours that he needed to fulfil “to remain in close proximity with her and get her support”. He says that her demands included “expensive luxury items”, support for the renovation of her official residence in New Delhi, and “secretarial and logistical help” for her travels within India and abroad.In her own deposition, Moitra told the committee members that she had taken exactly “four” gifts from Hiranandani, who also happened to be a friend. And that could not be construed as a “bribe”. “One, scarf; two, makeup from Baby Brown from Dubai airport; three, architect’s drawings of my house which was renovated by CPWD [Central Public Works Department]; and four, a car and a driver in Mumbai and Dubai…my questions are all my own,” she said.Moitra refuted having taken any “cash” from Hiranandani, and challenged the committee to establish a cash trail if indeed allegations against her were true. She has also repeatedly dismissed these allegations as a vindictive retaliation by an acrimonious boyfriend.Also read: Mahua Moitra’s Plight Is Testament to the Kismet of Women Politicians in IndiaAny of these versions could be true or false, but the committee, yet again, went mostly by Dehadrai’s allegations.The committee noted that Moitra allegedly “demanded favours including cash and expensive luxury items, secretarial and logistical help for her travels, while washing its hands off from a probe that could establish the alleged cash trail.”“As regards taking ‘cash’ from Shri Darshan Hiranandani as a sequel to ‘quid pro quo’, the Committee wish to candidly point out that they do not have the technical wherewithal and expertise to criminally investigate and unearth the ‘money trail’ which is invariably the task of Central Government Institutions (sic),” the report noted, while recommending a criminal probe on the alleged cash transactions made by Moitra and Hiranandani as part of ‘quid pro quo’. At one point, however, in the report, the committee also concludes, “In view of the totality of the facts and circumstances of the case, the Committee are of the opinion that the allegations of accepting illegal gratification by Smt. Mahua Moitra from Shri Darshan Hiranandani have been clearly established which are undeniable and based on systematic deliberations of the Committee on Ethics.”Thirdly, in view of the inability of the ethics committee to firmly establish the major allegations against Moitra, the committee did not cross-examine Hiranandani. Moitra demanded the committee to summon Hiranandani but the committee did not pay any heed.Instead, the committee members chose to give the maximum emphasis to the fact that Moitra shared her login credentials with Hiranandani. The report notes that by sharing her user ID and password with a non-MP, in this case Hiranandani, could have compromised “national security” as the portal contains a variety of confidential information only meant for MPs. The report also says that such an act could have made the Lok Sabha members’ portal open to breach, and could have been misused by someone making non-public documents like Bills and questions public.It concluded that Moitra had shared her login credentials with Hiranandani as it was found that her login credentials were used “47 times” from the same IP address in Dubai, when she wasn’t visiting the United Arab Emirates.In her response, Moitra has said that most MPs let their assistants and LAMP fellows do logistical work like uploading of questions, get passes, and similar other things. A large number of MPs have accepted that they have little knowledge about the digital medium, and generally ask their assistants adept in handling computers to do their work. So, Moitra emphasised that a majority of MPs have shared their user IDs and passwords with their staff, and that does not mean that MPs do not prepare their own questions.Also read: Data Rewind: A Shadow on Parliament’s Ability to Function Independently of the ExecutiveMoitra said that all MPs were like “conveyor belts” who receive information from the public and prepare their questions on the basis of shared information. She said that most of the information she sought through her questions regarding the Adani Group could have also been accessed by the Right to Information Act.She admitted that she had shared her login credentials but asserted that its use was not unsupervised. With each of the login, the access to the mandatory one-time password was only with her in her phone, she said.“My login ID and password were shared with someone in his office to upload it. This is my statement. I have not done anything unethical…The main thing is the supervised access…there are no rules which were given to us as to who could or who could not operate it…without the OTP, there is no access…nobody can put in even a single question. The OTP came to me,” she responded.Opposition MPs, too, have said that many of them operate the Lok Sabha portal through their assistants. They also believe that the committee, for the sake of a fair probe, should have cross-examined Hiranandani, too, like it did with Dehadrai and Dubey. In such circumstances, the report can only fuel speculation that the committee was governed more by vested political interests instead of principles of natural justice. The division among committee members along party lines only strengthens such conjectures.