New Delhi:
A war of words has broken out between Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal and his counterpart during the NDA regime, Arun Shourie after the latter slammed the Justice Shivraj Patil report on the 2G spectrum scam, calling it "a command performance from Kapil Sibal in order to protect Raja."
Sibal shot back at Shourie and asked him to substantiate his allegations.
"What Shourie says, he must prove", Sibal told NDTV.
The trigger was the Justice Patil report, which NDTV has access to, which states that telecom rules were tweaked to help Tata Teleservices during the NDA regime. It also details how, it says, Swan Telecom benefited during A Raja's tenure as Telecom Minister.
The report says that two major policy shifts were seen - one during the NDA regime and the other during UPA rule.
The judge notes that during the NDA rule, the TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) - headed by Pradeep Baijal - recommended on October 27, 2003, that all new telecom players be given licences through a process of multistage bidding or auction. Four days later, the TRAI recommendations were approved by the NDA cabinet.
However, the report says, this procedure was not followed. It states that after a phone call between Baijal and then Telecom Secretary Vinod Baish on November 17, 2003, a first-come-first-serve procedure was adopted to allocate new licences. The Justice Patil report states that the company that benefited from this was Tata Teleservices.
Arun Shourie was the Telecom Minister in the NDA regime during the period that the Patil report mentions.
Shourie said, "Such a fabrication and such a command performance brings the judiciary into disrepute and this is an unheard of procedure that you handpick a judge and he decides not to examine anybody and he decides to go by the documents handed over to him by a department led by an advocate called Kapil Sibal who is fabricating a case in defence of Raja."
The Patil report also states in detail how officials in the Department of Telecom (DoT), during the UPA regime, had raised questions about equity holdings of Shahid Balwa's Swan Telecom in January 2008. The officials questioned whether the company fulfilled the eligibility criteria to get a telecom licence.
These objections were, however, overruled by Siddharth Behura - who was the then Telecom Secretary and who was arrested last week along with A Raja - and the file was put before the minister, the report states. The minister then approved the application of Swan Telecom, it says. The report does not name A Raja, but he was the Telecom Minister then.