Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 4 (PTI) A day after the Enforcement Directorate sealed the office of Young Indian company in Herald House in New Delhi, the Congress in Kerala on Thursday said the ‘National Herald’ was ‘an emotion’ for both the country and the party and the saffron party does not know its history.
In a detailed Facebook post, Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly, V D Satheesan said the newspaper had played a crucial role in the country attaining independence and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had said once that the ‘National Herald’ won’t be closed even if he had to sell off his own house-Anand Bhavan.
“It was a historic responsibility for the Congress leadership to retain the ‘National Herald’ which had been loved so much by Nehru,” he said in the FB post.
Detailing its background, the senior Congress leader said the Associated Journals Limited (AJL) was a company founded in 1937 by Nehru with an objective of spreading the message of Indian freedom struggle to the people through publications and it had later published ‘National Herald’ in English, ‘Qaumi Awaz’ in Urdu and ‘Navjivan’ in Hindi.
All the three publications had been stopped in 2008 due to financial burden to the tune of crores of rupees and ‘Young Indian,’ a non-profit company in which Congress leaders including Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi were members, had taken over the liabilities of AJL.
The company later resumed publishing of newspapers and it grew to a point where salaries could be paid to the employees without any interruption, he said.
Accusing the Narendra Modi government at the Centre of ‘hounding’ the Congress leaders using the central agencies under the garb of a case filed by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy in 2012, Satheesan said the allegation that Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi had indulged in corruption was “irrational.” The shareholders or directors of Young Indian would not get a profit share as it was operating as a non-profit company.
The case and the sealing of the National Herald headquarters were part of the false propaganda unleashed by the BJP with a political motive to tarnish the Congress party and its leaders, the senior Congress leader further charged.
Don’t think that the Congress can be silenced with all this, Satheesan added.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday temporarily sealed the office of Young Indian (YI) company housed in the premises of Congress-owned newspaper National Herald here as part of an ongoing money laundering investigation.
Shortly after the ED action, the road to AICC headquarters was blocked by the Delhi police. PTI LGK LGK SS SS
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