Govt, opposition on warpath over Budget

NDA charges PM with refusing to accept memorandum.

The opposition NDA has threatened to review its decision to allow the Union Budget to be passed "peacefully without debate" after they accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of "impolite and discourteous" behaviour towards an NDA delegation. A meeting on the NDA's future course of action on the issue will take place tomorrow.

An NDA delegetion comprising of leader of the opposition L K Advani, convener of the NDA George Fernandes, BJP President Venkaiah Naidu and senior leaders like Jaswant Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Yashwant Sinha and V K Malhotra met the PM this afternoon with a memorandum listing their suggestions on the Union Budget.

According to BJP sources the continued criticism it has received for disrupting the House led them to seek a meeting with the PM.

"Not only did the prime minister most unfortunately not accept the note, his behaviour and the language that he used was regrettably impolite and discourteous," said Fernandes.

According to sources, the PM refused to accept the memorandum saying that since the opposition had already decided to forego the budget debate in favour of protests against tainted ministers and Uma Bharati's arrest.

According to the NDA, the PM simply "threw" the memorandum on his table, in the presence of leader of the House Pranab Mukherjee, parliamentary affairs minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and finance minister P Chidamabaram. "We won't take this. We have nothing to do with it", Fernandes quoted Singh as saying.

"The Prime Minister told us that there was no meaning to this memorandum and that we should have debated the budget in Parliament, he said that he refused to accept the note," said Fernandes.

Sources also said that leader of the opposition L K Advani told the PM that no one could have predicted that an arrest warrant would be issued against Uma Bharati. "These are unforseen things," Advani had purportedly told the PM. "However, after making the decision not to have a debate, what is the point of this memorandum except publicity," the PM has been quoted as saying.

"I have known him (Singh) since 1977 when I was industries minister and he was the chief economic advisor and I never expected this of him," said Fernandes.

According to highly placed sources, after the encounter, Ghulam Nabi Azad tried to effect a compromise, and the PM reportedly called up L K Advani around 4.30 pm telling him that it ws not "his intention" that the issue get so out of hand.

In fact it was Azad who finally made a statement defending the PM. "It is not true that the PM was rude. "There was no intention on the part of the PM to show any disrespect. The PM only said that 'this (the memorandum) does not erve any purpose as the correct forum to debate the budget is the Parliament'," quoted Azad.

"The PM was just stating a factual position that there was no point to the memorandum except as a publicity stunt," added Azad.

With this fracas far from over, the smooth passage for the Union budget that the government thought it had ensured is now imperilled.

With NDA set to meet tomorrow morning to decide its strategy, the second part of the budget session has been split wide open.