Although the combined DMK-Congress lobby in Parliament’s Public Acounts Committee (PAC) successfully stalled the testimony of top bureaucrats in the 2G spectrum hearing, Murli Manohar Joshi is planning to hit back. The PAC chairman plans to table the report at the earliest. As the first step, the Joshi-led majority faction of the committee will distribute the draft report among PAC members in the last week of April before the committee meets formally on April 28. There is no convention of an interim PAC report.
Sources in the PAC told Business Standard that 90 per cent of the report on 2G is complete. Even if Congress and DMK members oppose the submission of the report, the chairman can go ahead after incorporating their objections in the final report.
Disruption from Congress and DMK members forced Joshi to drop the plans of questioning top bureaucrats, including the cabinet secretary and Prime Minister’s principal secretary. But sources in the PAC claimed that both had already provided elaborate answers to questionnaires sent to them and the Prime Minister’s Office had given thousands of pages of documents to the PAC. “We wanted to ask the PM’s principal secretary for clarifications on certain footnotes. Not being able to question them is not a significant setback,” said a senior member of the PAC.
At the meeting on Thursday, Congress and DMK members raised several questions in an attempt to prevent the PAC from going ahead with the probe. The group, comprising K S Rao, Naveen Jindal, Arun Kumar, Saifuddin Soz of Congress and Tiruchi Siva of the DMK reiterated that former telecom ministers A Raja and BJP’s Arun Shourie should be summoned and the balance sheet of all companies that got 2G spectrum should be scrutinised by the committee. The members also demanded that the PAC hand over the papers to the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) and stop the proceedings.
Six members argued against a PAC probe while the other six present on Thursday countered it with the asertion that the PAC should not abandon its responsibilities. “When the facts are the same, why should we presume that the two committees will have different findings? If that happens let the people decide which committee did a better job,” argued a non-BJP member.
Raising the pitch against the Congress and the DMK who argued that the 2G scam is sub-judice, BJD’s Bhartruhari Mahtab submitted a written document on “what is sub-judice” and asked what barred a Parliamentary Committee from discussing a sub-judice issue when the media was doing it incessantly.
The pro-probe lobby in the committee pointed out that a former PAC chairman, Buta Singh, had in fact, not consulted the members and without the permission of the Lok Sabha Speaker had tabled a report of the PAC on the scam involving the import of coffins for Kargil war martyrs. “Do you want this report to become another Coffingate report?” Congress’ K S Rao, asked Joshi. The BJP leader’s replied: “I am seeking co-operation from all members of the group in preparing the report.”
When members were asked if they wanted the PAC to submit the report or not, neither of the Congress MP answered in the positive. However, some Congressmen did say they needed more time to go through the “documents weighing 20 kilos.”