New Delhi:
The BJP appears to have softened its stand to call the Prime Minister and Finance Minister to the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC), which is examining the allocation of 2G spectrum from 1998 to 2009. It had been staying away in protest against the JPC chairman P C Chacko's insistence that there was no precedent to call either the PM or the Finance Minister. The BJP's members boycotted the JPC's sessions for two months.
But today, the BJP made no demand for an immediate decision on summoning the PM or the Finance Minister. The BJP's Ravi Shankar Prasad, however, indicated that the Prime Minister can be asked questions in the form of a questionnaire.
Mr Chacko welcomed the return of the BJP members but reiterated his earlier position that a decision to summon Dr Manmohan Singh and Mr Chidambaram will be taken on consensus at a later date.
Before attending today's proceedings, BJP members had said that the deposition of former Cabinet Secretary K M Chandrasekar has given ample evidence to call the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister before the panel.
During the meeting of the JPC last month, a senior bureaucrat had said that in December 2007, he wrote to the Prime Minister suggesting that mobile network licenses be sold for Rs. 36,000 crore each to telecoms. The licenses, however, were sold a month later for Rs. 1600 crore each and the manner in which they were allotted led to then Telecom Minister A Raja spending nearly a year in jail.
K M Chandrashekhar was then the Cabinet Secretary. His disclosure about his letter allowed the Opposition BJP and the Left to reiterate that the Prime Minister was aware that 2G airwaves and mobile licenses were worth a lot more than what they were being sold for. The party says that Finance Minister P Chidambaram and the Prime Minister must testify for the group to explain why they did not intervene to prevent Mr Raja from blatantly bending the rules. Mr Sinha had written a letter to Mr Chacko in October expressing his unhappiness over the fact that the panel has not yet called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh or P Chidambaram as witnesses.
A body of GSM operators is appearing before the JPC today to put across the views of the telecom operators before it finalises its report.
BJP has six members in the JPC including Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh, Dharmendra Pradhan, Gopinath Munde, Haren Pathak and Ravi Shankar Prasad.