Documents in Epstein files related to India have disappeared, Pawan Khera claims

Congress Spokesperson Pawan Khera has claimed that at least 60 files with references to India in the tranche of documents from late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate released on the US Department of Justice website have allegedly disappeared since the US-India trade deal was signed.

He asked: ‘Was an anti-India trade deal the price paid to make scandalous material disappear? Did the govt trade away India’s interests just to rescue its rapidly collapsing reputation?’

“The only development that took place in between is the one-sided, pro-US trade deal. So the obvious question is unavoidable. Was an anti-India trade deal the price paid to make scandalous material disappear? Did the government trade away India’s interests just to rescue its rapidly collapsing reputation?” Khera asked on social media.

Convicted child molester and Financier Jeffrey Epstein died in prison in Manhattan in 2019 before his trial on sex trafficking of minors could begin. The more than three million pages of documents released by the Department of Justice contain, among other things, photographs and emails between Epstein and heads of various states and business tycoons across the globe.

Khera said the Congress had a team going through the Epstein documents looking for references to India.

“On February 6, a search for ‘India’ in the Epstein files on the US Department of Justice website returned 484 pages of results. Each page contains 10 documents. We know this because a dedicated team was sifting through files on each page and systematically cataloguing documents of interest from each page number,” Khera wrote.

“Today, if you repeat the process, only 478 pages show up. This means six pages, roughly 60 files, have disappeared from the search results.”

A joint statement issued by Washington and India said over the weekend that India has offered to cut or eliminate duties on select US agricultural products. It is widely believed that the deal would have some impact on India’s agricultural sector.

The Congress has described the deal as a “surrender.”

“They increased the tariff from 3 per cent to 50 per cent and then reduced it to 18 per cent. The government has set a target that in the next five years there will be a bilateral deal of approximately $500 billion, roughly ₹44 lakh crore. The commerce minister (Piyush Goyal) did not say how much export target India has set,” Khera had said on Saturday.

On Monday, Khera said, “The BJP, usually unnecessarily loud, has gone eerily silent on the Epstein disclosures. What is the party trying to hide behind the wall of silence?”

The release of Epstein files have rocked governments in multiple countries. Norway’s foreign ministry on Sunday said a prominent ambassador, Mona Juul, would step down due to a “serious failure of judgement” over ties to the late Epstein.

The ministry earlier this week suspended Juul from her position as ambassador to Jordan and Iraq pending an internal inquiry into links to Epstein. Juul, 66, a former junior government minister, previously represented Norway as ambassador to Israel, Britain and the UN.