Even as Congress President Rahul Gandhi gives sermons to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for shielding fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya and also intends to fund his NYAY scheme through extracting money from fugitive businessmen, Congress ally NCP are busy joining hands with Vijay Mallya’s son-in-law Samar Singh.

According to a report by Mid Day, Samar Singh, son-in-law of fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya was campaigning for NCP candidate Parth Pawar, a son of former deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar. Parth Pawar is contesting in the Lok Sabha elections as a joint candidate of NCP-Congress alliance from Maval constituency. It is believed that Singh handles Parth’s social media.

“Samar Singh and Parth Pawar are friends for a long time. Samar and his wife are not much connected to the Mallya family as has been portrayed. Samar had joined Parth out of curiosity to see his friend contest the election and had visited few places with him to see the real situation. He has gone back to the US,” reportedly one of their common friends told Midday.

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Interestingly, Samar Singh’s is actively involved with the Congress ally NCP even as Congress President Rahul Gandhi wants to extract from some of the industrialists and businessmen to fund his ‘NYAY’ scheme. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had recently said funds for his party’s “NYAY” minimum income guarantee scheme will come from the pockets of fugitive businessmen like Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi.

“The money (for NYAY scheme) will come from the pockets of ‘chor’ (thieves) like Anil Ambani, Vijay Mallya to whom Chowkidar Narendra Modi has given money during the last four years… We will deposit it in the accounts of the poor, particularly women, irrespective of their caste, class or religion,” he had said in an election rally.

The attack on fugitives and other industrialists by the Gandhi scion came at a time when he was trying to deviate the criticism he had received by a large section of the middle-class population after he had put up an idea to tax the middle class to fund his flagship populist scheme NYAY, a minimum income guarantee scheme.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi announced the NYAY scheme on March 25 last month aiming to provide Rs 72,000 per year (Rs 6,000 per month) to the poorest 20 per cent families or 5 crore families in India living Below the Poverty Line (BPL).

However, one of Rahul Gandhi’s aide had spilt the bean regarding the funding pattern of the scheme. Noted economist Abhijit Banerjee, who advised the Congress party on the formulation of the scheme, had made some startling revelations regarding the rationale behind the funding of the scheme.

In an interview with Times Now, Banerjee said that the NYAY will have to funded by new taxes. He said that at present India’s fiscal deficit is so large that the scheme is simply not sustainable without raising taxes.

Following the backlash against overtaxing the middle class, Rahul Gandhi had then come up with another new idea to fund the Congress party’s minimum income guarantee scheme. Rahul Gandhi had said that his pet project NYAY will be funded by the amount recovered from bank loan defaulters and fugitives.