Congress turns on Hardeep Puri over purported Epstein photo, asks if trade deal is affected

The Congress on Wednesday opened a fresh attack on Union Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri over an undated photograph that party leaders say was released by the US Department of Justice and shows him seated across a table from the late Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender.

Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, tied the picture’s appearance to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to India this week, during which both sides said a trade deal was close. “Rubio goes to Mumbai. The US DOJ releases a picture of Epstein and Puri,” he wrote on X. In a second post he asked: “Dear BJP and RSS workers, which anti-national traitor do you think they’re blackmailing?”

‘Solo photograph’

Congress media head Pawan Khera said the picture had “inconveniently bulldozed” Puri’s defence because it showed the minister alone with Epstein, not as part of a delegation. “Puri claims 1-2 meetings and 3-4 emails over eight years,” Khera said, adding that the US files showed “at least 62 emails back and forth” between the two in 2014 to 2017 alone. He also said the records pointed to 14 meetings and other interactions, several of them one-on-one.

“Which of his many meetings with Epstein does his newly surfaced solo photograph capture?” Khera asked, and called on the government to show “the moral courage” to order an investigation.

Party general secretary K C Venugopal went after the Prime Minister and the Home Minister. “Modi-Shah’s complete silence and inaction on this only points to their criminal indifference,” he said, and asked: “Do these revelations have any bearings on the final contours of the deal?” He said Narendra Modi needed to speak up on the issue.

Supriya Shrinate, who runs the party’s social media, asked: “Didn’t Hardeep Puri say he had never met Epstein one-on-one?” Seva Dal chief Srinivas B V said that in any other democracy, the Prime Minister and his whole Cabinet would have resigned. “But then, we have the BJP,” he wrote.

Puri’s earlier stand

Puri had not responded to the new picture by late Wednesday, and neither the BJP nor the US government had commented on it. Earlier this year, after Rahul Gandhi first raised the Epstein files, the minister accused him of innuendo and said he had met Epstein on a few occasions, as part of a delegation, and that those meetings had nothing to do with Epstein’s crimes.

The BJP spent Wednesday on a different line of attack. In Bhubaneswar, party spokesperson Sambit Patra accused Rahul Gandhi of seeking regime change and claimed he had been coached by George Soros on a four-day private trip to Vietnam, made while protests over the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls were under way.

Rubio held talks with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in Mumbai on Tuesday and said afterwards that the two countries were about as close to a trade agreement as they could be.