Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members on the Joint Parliamentary Committee to probe allocation and pricing of telecom licences have given a dissent note to the majority decision which largely absolved the government of wrongdoing.
“The report of the JPC is a bundle of untruths, half-truths and contradictions. It is an attempt to cover up the truth and protect the guilty,” said the note. The party had six members in the 31-member JPC — Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh, Ravi Shanker Prasad, Gopinath Munde, Harin Pathak and Dharmendra Pradhan. The JPC was formed in February 2011, after opposition party protests, including the stalling of the 2010 winter session of Parliament. Sinha alleged the JPC (majority) report was prepared by the government rather than the panel’s secretariat.
“The prime minister, the prime minister's office, the finance ministry, department of telecom and its officials all had a hand in preparing the report and in covering up the whole thing,” Sinha said. “The Congress’s vice-president should tear this report, too,” he added, referring to Rahul Gandhi’s comment on the government’s proposed ordinance to protect convicted politicians.
Speaking to a news agency, P C Chacko, the committee chairman and a senior Congress party MP, said, “The JPC report was drafted by my secretariat and under my directions. The charge of Sinha and company shows their desperation. It is completely political.”
The dissent note criticised Chacko for ‘stonewalling’ on the facts and shielding Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P Chidambaram.
The note said Chacko acted in the ‘most partisan fashion’ and lacked ‘dignity, grace and decorum’.
“The sole objective of the …chairman (was) to use every device to prevent the facts from coming on record, and to thereby shield the prime minister and the finance minister.”
The BJP said there was ‘incontrovertible evidence’ against the PM and finance minister for their role in spectrum allocation but the chairman did not call them as witnesses despite repeated requests. The party also questioned the intentions of Chacko in not summoning former telecom ministers Dayanidhi Maran and A Raja, despite the latter asking to be made a witness.
“We have no hesitation in concluding, therefore, that the prime minister and the finance minister are equally, if not more, guilty in the 2G scam than Dayanidhi Maran and A Raja, since they carried a higher responsibility,” said the dissent note.
The BJP also criticised Congress leaders and the chairman for ‘shabbily’ treating former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai. “The chairman allowed the Congress members to go on endlessly questioning Vinod Rai for over three days. Questions were put to him by the Congress members in a most insulting manner, as if he had committed a crime,” it said.
The leaders justified the audit report of the CAG which had in 2010 estimated Rs 1.76 lakh crore as the ‘presumptive loss’ in the allocation of second-generation telecom spectrum.
