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Was forced to put out ad against Jaitley as a newspaper didn't take my editorial: Jethmalani

Written by : TNM

Readers of The Indian Express on Tuesday morning found a half-page advertisement put out by Supreme Court lawyer and former Law Minister Ram Jethmalani on the fifth page.On Sunday, the former member of the BJP had taken to Twitter and Facebook to level allegations against the BJP government with a focus on the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in particular. Jethmalani had questioned the BJP’s resolve to bring ‘Black Money’ back into the country and had posed twelve questions to Jaitley asking him to explain his stand on the issue.In the piece, Jethmalani also took pot-shots at Jaitley’s apparent proximity with Congressman P Chidambaram and media conglomerate NDTV.Read: Jethmalani taken on Jaitley. The same set of questions found their way into The Indian Express this morning with the piece captioned as an “advertisement”.Speaking to The News Minute, Jethmalani alleges that the piece wasn’t intended to be published in The Indian Express and that he was forced to send it there after another publication refused to carry the article.Alleging that the piece was “blacked out”, Jethmalani has said that this was the first time that this has happened as he is a regular columnist with the newspaper which is yet to respond to our query.Jethmalani has also suggested that he suspected an intervention on the part of Jaitley, saying that “This time the Finance Minister has played some mischief”.Before the BJP came into power, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his campaign speeches had promised to look into the black money issue. After the BJP President Amit Shah recently said that the issue was a mere “election jumla”, Jethmalani in his piece has called it “confession enough of an intentional fraud on the nation”.  According to the official rate card for advertisements in the publication, Jethmalani could have paid Rs 94,000 for the advertisement.Read- FCRA licenses of 10,117 NGOs cancelled, UP and AP top the list

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