New Delhi:
Former Chief Justice of India JS Verma has hit out at the government for not acting on the cash-for-votes scam. He has warned that the judiciary might have to step in, if the government failed to push the probe into the scam.
"The Supreme Court is monitoring 2G, and this and that...why, because otherwise nothing was happening. Therefore, it appears the only way if those, whose jobs primarily it is to do it, and have not done it and they are merely passing the blame to each other. Well I think the judiciary needs to step in and force them to do their job," he said.
On July 22 2008, Dr Manmohan Singh won the vote of confidence by a slim margin. The Left had quit the government over India's nuclear deal with the US. In the days leading upto the vote, there were hectic political negotiations to win new friends and influence people.
The cash-for-votes scam erupted hours before the vote of confidence took place when three BJP MPs walked into the Lok Sabha with cash that they said added upto three crore rupees. They claimed that that they had been offered this money to vote for the nuclear deal and had planned a sting operation to prove this.
A Lok Sabha committee, headed by Congress MP KC Deo, was set up to examine their allegations, but found that there was no evidence of the BJP's claims.
The matter had disappeared from the political landscape till a WikiLeaks cable leaked last week kissed it back to life.