New Delhi:
The government, struggling with an Opposition that refuses to budge from its demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) inquiry into the 2G scam, insists for now that it will run Parliament for the scheduled length of the Winter Session.
There has been much talk of adjourning Parliament sine die much earlier than December 13, since no business has been transacted in either House since the session began on November 9, with the Opposition forcing adjournments everyday over its demand.
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pawan Bansal told NDTV on Thursday, after another wasted day, that, "the government will run the House everyday till December 13."
He also said that each one of those days, "the government will try to reason out with the Opposition...There is no question of sine die."
On the Opposition refusing to budge on anything less than a JPC inquiry, Bansal said, "If the Opposition is insisting on a JPC only to summon the Prime Minister and ministers, I am afraid they will not have their say."
The government has tried at repeated meetings to break the deadlock in Parliament by offering other inquiries into the matter, like one by the Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC), assisted by multi-disciplinary investigative agencies.
The Opposition has rejected this, saying it wants nothing less than a JPC. It has argued that the PAC does not have powers to summon senior ministers, which the JPC does. So saying they have held up all work at Parliament.
On Thursday morning too, minutes after Parliament convened for the day, both Houses were adjourned following loud protests and chaos.
Meanwhile, taking on the BJP for allowing Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa to continue in office despite several charges of illicit land deals, Sonia Gandhi said, "According to the principles of the Congress, the government has acted on corruption. Wherever we have got a serious complaint, we have taken action...we are not like the others. We will not tolerate corruption at any cost. I want to say to the entire opposition that on the issue of corruption, they should show action on corruption like the Congress has."
Sources say the government has been actively weighing whether to cut short the Winter Session as a lot of the tax-payer's money is being wasted. The eight successive days of adjournment of Parliament without any major business translate into a loss of a staggering Rs 63 crore with the expenditure for each day of a session calculated at Rs 7.8 crore.
The expenditure for each minute of the day has been calculated to be Rs 26,000 per minute.