New Delhi:
A note on the telecom scam prepared and circulated within the government caused a political seizure because it questioned whether P Chidambaram had done enough as Finance Minister in 2008 to enforce the auction of spectrum - the absence of an auction is attributed as one of the main passages of the telecom scam, which has landed its alleged architect and former minister A Raja in jail.
The note was officially sent to the Prime Minister's Office on March 25 by a bureaucrat within the Finance Ministry. A notation said the document had been "seen by" Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. The document empowered the Opposition to make a raucous demand for the resignation of Mr Chidambaram, who is now Home Minister. It also seemed to graph the rivalry between two of the government's most senior ministers - Mr Mukherjee and Mr Chidambaram.
Now, NDTV has accessed a letter written by Mr Mukherjee to the PM. Written on September 26, a day after Mr Mukherjee met the PM in New York when the crisis was climaxing, the letter explains Mr Mukherjee's position. The Finance Minister says he was never in favour of submitting a formal note on spectrum allocation to the Prime Minister's Office (the documentation would mean that the Right to Information Act could be used to access the note - which is exactly what happened). (
Read the letter)
Mr Mukherjee says that it was the Prime Minister's Office that insisted on the submission of the document, and that in its original version, the note had 12 paras which were written by Finance Ministry officials. After this first cut was emailed to the cabinet secretariat on March 17, another 18 paras were added by officials there, who acknowledged in a letter to Mr Mukherjee that his department's note had been modified substantially. The cabinet secretariat is responsible for the administration of the government and for handling transactions and coordinating policies within ministries.
The damaging part for Mr Chidambaram lay in a sentence that said the Ministry of Finance could have "stuck to the stand" of auctioning spectrum. In his letter to the PM, Mr Mukherjee suggests that this sentence was added by officials in the cabinet secretariat and that it was revised after consultations with Dr Singh's office and the cabinet secretariat to reflect the language that finally appeared in the note sent by the Finance Ministry on March 25. He also states that the final draft of the note was the result of consultations between the Prime Minister's Office and the cabinet secretariat.
The document is now with the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) studying the 2G scam - and continues to cause political aftershocks.
The JPC yesterday asked the government to explain why the controversial note had not been presented to the panel before it was presented in the Supreme Court in September after being unearthed by a Right to Information application.
Secretary Economic Affairs R Gopalan and Secretary Revenue R S Gujaral appeared before the JPC, and said that the note was not shared because it did not offer any new information, and served as a post-facto compilation of documents. Pranab Mukherjee had said the note served as an inter-ministerial background paper, which was prepared after inputs from different departments.
Opposition members of the JPC have said that all documents used to prepare the Finance Ministry's note should be shared.