New Delhi: An unconditional apology, withdrawal of statements, removal of allegations, and disclosure of complete factual information—a pretty tall order, but it’s just what senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Nishikant Dubey wants from former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg. Dubey’s latest salvo has intensified the ongoing war of words between the politician and retired bureaucrat.
“If you don’t apologise within seven days, I’ll make sure to drag you all the way to the bars. I myself was the chairman of the finance sub-committee in the PAC, I used to summon him daily before my very eyes—no room for insolence,” Dubey wrote in a social media post Monday evening.
Dubey said that he had never seen the finance ministry office to this day, nor had he met the late Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, or the incumbent Nirmala Sitharaman.
The four-time BJP Member of Parliament (MP) from Godda (Jharkhand) even posted three pages from the defamation notice he filed against Garg. The notice by Dubey comes five days after Garg posted a link to his over two-hour-long podcast with Youtuber Shalini Kapoor Tiwari.
सुभाष गर्ग @Subhashgarg1960 सात दिन में माफ़ी मॉंगो नहीं तो सलाख़ों तक ले जाने की कोशिश करूँगा ।मैं ख़ुद PAC में वित्त के सब कमिटि का अध्यक्ष था,रोज़ अपने सामने हाजिर कराता था, बदज़ुबानी नहीं चलेगी ।मैंने आज तक वित्त मंत्रालय का कार्यालय नहीं देखा है ।मैं अपनी सरकार में भी कंभी… pic.twitter.com/WboU97aqbK
— Dr Nishikant Dubey (@nishikant_dubey) September 21, 2026
The notice states that Garg had referred to him as a “blackmailing kind of person”, and that he had stated that the BJP MP had come to the finance secretary’s office “to lean on the Chairman of the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) to get his work done”.
The post is the latest in an intense exchange of comments between Dubey and Garg, beginning with the latter’s relentless debunking of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim of India’s first-quarter GDP growth rate of 7.8 percent. Garg had alleged that the Union Government had changed the methodology used for past GDP calculations.
In his post last week sharing the podacst, Garg said he had responded to everyone from “Nishikant Dubey to the Chief Economic Adviser to the secretary of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) about the reality of the missing Rs 12.7 lakh crore of GDP”, as well as his commentary on India’s latest growth rates.
‘Apology in Hindi and English’
Garg served as secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs from July 2017 to July 2019 and briefly held the position of finance secretary between March and June 2019.
Dubey said that Garg had imputed that he had approached the former Finance Secretary to obtain a favour from the Chairman of LIC. Dubey’s notice demands that Garg “unconditionally and unequivocally withdraw and retract the imputation” that the former was a “blackmailing kind of person”.
The notice also demands an “unconditional, unqualified written apology” in both Hindi and English as well as publishing the withdrawal and apology on every platform on which Garg had made his allegations.
The BJP MP demanded that the former bureaucrat “remove the podcast and every clip, short, excerpt, post and reference” which contains the statements, and disclose the complete factual and documentary basis of the alleged meeting between the two.
“Furnish a written undertaking that you shall not repeat, publish or circulate the impugned imputations or any substantially similar imputations against my client; and preserve and not delete, alter or tamper with the complete unedited recording and raw footage of the Podcast, all communications with the host, producers and platforms and every diary, message or email concerning the alleged meeting.”
In the podcast, Garg had stated that during his tenure as finance secretary, Dubey had approached him with certain files or matters, which he perceived as lobbying or advocacy on behalf of corporate interests.
Dubey cautioned that Garg’s failure to comply would attract criminal defamation cases under Section 356 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and other applicable provisions as well as civil proceedings for damages.
This is not the first time that these two have locked horns. In 2018, Dubey claimed that he had written to the prime minister raising questions about Garg’s economic policies and functioning during the latter’s term as economic affairs secretary.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
Also Read: Like his tenure as finance secretary, IAS officer Subhash Garg’s exit was also on own terms