New Delhi, December 12
BJP MP from Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh, Suresh Chandel was among the 11 MPs caught by spycam accepting money for raising questions in Parliament.

The expose by tehelka fame Aniruddha Bahal of cobrapost.com and Aaj Tak shocked the nation, and it comes within days of the Volcker report.

Suresh Chandel is the second noted member of parliament from Himachal Pradesh to be found in the thick of a corruption scandal.

Former Union Minister Sukh Ram, who represented the Mandi parliamentary seat, found himself in an embarrassing situation when the investigating agencies raided his premises and recovered hard cash worth over Rs 2.6 crore.

For the BJP, this is yet another embarrassing moment, as its past president Bangaru Laxman was caught accepting Rs 1 lakh from undercover tehelka reporters. Dilip Singh Judeo, former Minister of State, was another member of the party caught accepting bribe from a mining firm in Orissa.

The “questiongate” expose, the journalists posed as representatives of fictitious lobby organisation North Indian Small Manufacturing Association and met MPs and their middlemen and succeeded in having MPs across the party lines, submit more than 60 questions in the rigorous question balloting system of Parliament, out of which 25 (at the last count) were selected.

While bulk of the questions were related to the welfare of Small-Scale Industrial units, there were several public interest questions also handed over to them like non-performing assets, the SEBI inquiry into the 2004 stock market crash, Aniruddha Bahal, editor of the website, said in a statement.