New Delhi: Lalit Kumar Modi, former Indian Premiere League (IPL) commissioner currently staying in United Kingdom, has stirred a political storm back home.
At the centre of the controversy is External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who helped Lalit Modi, an Indian fugitive, to procure travel documents in Britain last year. She is being targeted by opposition for helping out a “fugitive” and they have demanded her resignation.
The controversy erupted after disclosure of emails showing that Swaraj had spoken to Indian-origin British MP Keith Vaz and its High Commissioner here James Bevan favouring the grant of travel documents to Lalit Modi to go to Portugal, purportedly for his wife's cancer treatment in June last year.
Lalit Modi, son of billionaire businessman Krishan Kumar Modi (K.K. Modi), has lived his life in a flamboyant but controversial manner.
After finishing his school from Shimla and (Nainital), Lalit went United States to continue his studies. Modi attended Pace University in New York for two years, and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, for a year but he did not graduate either of them.
When in US, Modi was arrested and charged with conspiracy to traffic cocaine, kidnapping and assault. An article in Caravan Magazine reads, “In 1985, while at Duke, Modi was one of four students who met one Saturday in a motel room to buy half a kilogram of cocaine for $10,000. The seller, in fact, had no cocaine; he did have a shotgun, which he used to coax the students out of their $10,000. The next day, the quartet fell upon a fellow student whom they accused of setting them up for the robbery.”
Modi was placed on a five-year probation but was allowed to return back to India by the Durham County Court on the condition to perform 200 hours of community service in India.
Lalit Modi's marriage was not a typical one. He, in 1991, married to a friend of her mother Minal Sagrani, nine years older, divorced and a mother of one. It was Minal for whose ‘cancer treatment in Portugal' Modi was helped by EAM Sushma Swaraj.
Swaraj in her clarification said that she helped Modi on “humanitarian grounds” so that he could attend to his wife while she was treated for cancer in Lisbon on August 4, 2014.
While his twitter post ‘confirm' that he was actually at Champalimaud centre for the unknown, a cancer research centre in Lisbon, this is not the only thing he has been doing with after that.
The travel documents Lalit Modi procured not only helped him to ‘sign papers for his wife's cancer treatment' but he also travelled around the world partying with supermodels and celbrities.
He has travelled all over the world for different purposes, including partying with Paris Hilton and Naomi Campbell.
