Sensitive information about India’s military is not made public in the larger interest of the nation, Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said. Even past defence ministers AK Antony and Pranab Mukherjee had not disclosed such information to the Parliament, he said.

New Delhi: Slamming Congress president Rahul Gandhi for resorting to “falsehood” and “behaving irresponsibly”, Union Minister and senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Monday that the principal Opposition party’s stand on the French Rafale jet deal was “not in the national interest”. “Rahul Gandhi is behaving irresponsibly. Dragging the French President into internal politics is unfortunate,” the union law minister said, as quoted by news agency ANI. “His understanding of national security issues is poor.”

Taking a swipe at the Gandhi family, Prasad said that since the Congress president had “resorted to falsehood”, those around the Gandhis had no option but to “collectively sing the tune of falsehood”.

Sensitive information about India’s military is not made public “in the larger interest of nation”, he said, adding that even past defence ministers under the UPA regime such as AK Antony and Pranab Mukherjee had not “disclosed sensitive information about armed forces to the Parliament”.

According to the understanding reached between the then UPA government and France, India was supposed to buy 18 Rafale planes from France’s Dassault Aviation company in an off-the-shelf deal while 108 planes were to be assembled by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, a public sector firm.

But later the terms of the deal changed, with the Narendra Modi government agreeing to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets. The Congress has been claiming that in the revised deal, the cost of each aircraft is much higher than what was negotiated by the UPA. The NDA government has dismissed such claims, saying that the Congress is misrepresenting facts of the deal.

Speaking during the no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha last week, Gandhi had claimed that he had personally met the French president and asked him if there was any “secrecy” pact between France and India, as purportedly claimed by the BJP government. “The French president told me that there is no such pact between the French and Indian governments,” the Congress president said on the floor of the House. “This is the truth, and he (the French president) told me that I have no objection to it (details of the Rafale deal) being made public; you can tell it to entire India.”