About 40 Members of Parliament cutting across party lines met Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Union Home Minister L K Advani yesterday seeking their intervention to stop the long-pending Tata Singapore Airline project from being cleared by the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB).
Samajwadi Party MP Amar Singh later claimed that Vajpayee was "appreciative of the apprehensions raised against the project". The Home Minister, he said, was "attentive but not receptive".
Singh claimed that Advani did not appreciate a serious objection raised by the MPs against the project on the ground that foreign airlines should be kept away from sensitive radar and other equipments operating from various airports. "Advaniji said such intelligence methods had become obsolete as now satellite pictures can easily be taken of everything".
Vajpayee was "very, very sympathetic. He did not reject any of the points raised by us", Singh said.
The group consisted of the Congress chief whip in the Lok Sabha, P J Kurien, and former civil aviation ministers Ghulam Nabi Azad and C M Ibrahim, Amar Singh, former Union labour minister B S Ramoowalia, and CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta.
The two most visible members of the group were two MPs of the Telugu Desam Party led by former minister Yerran Naidu. TDP is supporting the government from outside.
Ramoowalia alleged that an industrialist close to the Tata group who played a role in formation of this government, and a media baron, were "acting as agents" of the Singapore Airlines.
The media baron is going around claiming that a green signal for the project was a foregone conclusion as the FIPB was set to clear the project at its next meeting on August 8, he claimed.
Both Singh and Ramoowalia claimed that BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, who was one of the most vociferous opponents of the project when it came up for consideration when the United Front was in power, was now maintaining a silence over the issue. They wondered if Mahajan had been pressurised by senior leaders in the party. Pramod Mahajan was not present in Parliament yesterday. The members coming out of their meeting with Vajpayee castigated the BJP for abandoning its Swadeshi agenda which had proved to be a "big hoax". Ramoowalia alleged that "This would be the second biggest sell-out by this government after the Maruti-Suzuki deal".
