On Wednesday, the BJP’s Central Election Committee named Union Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri as its candidate for the Rajya Sabha bypoll in Madhya Pradesh. The timing is difficult to look past. The announcement came slightly more than a week after photographs of Puri with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein made headlines. A party that wanted the controversy to fade had the option of letting it. It chose to put his name forward.
First, what is documented must be examined. Puri is not accused of any crime, and appearing in a document release is not an allegation of wrongdoing in itself. But the record is more than a passing mention. Emails between Puri and Epstein began in June 2014, and the documents show Puri met Epstein at his Manhattan townhouse on at least three occasions, February 4, 2015, January 6, 2016, and May 19, 2017. The Wire reports that the correspondence spans June 2014 to June 2017. The Congress claims the count is far higher, at 62 email exchanges and 14 meetings, a figure I could not verify independently and which should be treated as the party’s allegation.
Puri’s account is where the questions begin. On February 11, he said he had met Epstein on “three or maximum four” occasions as part of a delegation, and that his interactions had no connection to the allegations against the financier. He has also told Indian media that his dealings were strictly business-related. But The Wire has pointed out that Puri has not claimed he never met Epstein alone, and had questioned his account that the meetings were part of a delegation led by his former boss at the International Peace Institute. A delegation and a private townhouse meeting are different things, and the public has not been given a clear, documented explanation of which meetings were which. At a press conference, he dismissed the allegations as baseless and attacked Rahul Gandhi for making them. A denial is not an explanation.
Then there is the nomination itself. The seat fell vacant after Union Minister L Murugan resigned from the Council of Ministers and from the Rajya Sabha on October 14. Polling is scheduled for November 12. Because the BJP holds a comfortable majority in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly, Puri is expected to win unopposed. His own seat is running out. His term from Uttar Pradesh ends on November 25. There had been speculation earlier this month about why he was left out of the BJP’s list of eight Rajya Sabha candidates from Uttar Pradesh. He was passed over once and then found a safe seat in a state he does not represent, at a moment when the opposition was asking him questions he had not fully answered.
The Congress has made predictable use of it. In Bhopal, Leader of the Opposition Umang Singhar said the BJP, which speaks about women’s safety and the Ladli Behna scheme, should clarify why it nominated Puri, and asked whether it could not find a capable Dalit, tribal or OBC candidate from Madhya Pradesh. Congress’s Pawan Khera said the links warrant an independent investigation, not a Rajya Sabha seat. Some of the rhetoric goes further than the evidence supports: Rahul Gandhi asked which “anti-national traitor” the US is blackmailing, an insinuation with nothing behind it in the record.
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But the BJP’s own position is harder to defend. Madhya Pradesh BJP president Hemant Khandelwal congratulated Puri on the nomination. Beyond Puri’s own statements, I found no explanation from the party about why a minister facing unresolved questions was the right choice for a new seat, nor any account of what review, if any, it carried out. A party that asks the public to trust it on women’s safety owes more than congratulations.
The larger lesson is about standards. In politics, “named in files” does not mean guilty. But it does create a duty to answer, and the more senior the office, the larger the duty. Puri could end the matter by publishing the full record of his meetings and correspondence, and by saying plainly which meetings were part of a delegation and which were not. The BJP could ask him to do so before the nomination papers are filed. So far, neither has happened. A safe seat is not an answer, and it will not make the questions go away.
