The Bharatiya Janata Party on Thursday blamed P Chidambaram, as finance minister in 2008, for “misleading” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the 2G spectrum allocation, and demanded his resignation for his “complicity” in the multicrore scam.
The party leadership alleged that UPA government was at war with itself as there was distrust among senior ministers in the government, while the PM and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi were “mute spectators”.
“It is shameful that the finance minister of a country was directly responsible for 2G scam,” said senior BJP leader M M Joshi, who is also the chairman of the parliamentary panel that probed the 2G scam. “We strongly demand that either Chidambaram resigns or the PM dismisses him.”
Senior BJP leaders suspect Chidambaram kept the PM in the dark, and misled Singh because he was “directly responsible” for the scam. “We,” added Joshi, “want to know how the PM, a well-known economist, was misled. Or whether he chose to be misled.”
The BJP leader also asked the present finance minister Pranab Mukherjee to ask his ministry to find out the quantum of loss in the 2G scam, given that both the CAG and CBI have given different figures for loss to the government.
Added Joshi’s party colleague Arun Jaitley: “We do Mukherjee will not shirk from his public responsibility to make a full and frank disclosure of the circumstances under which the note was written.”
