New Delhi:
A joint parliamentary committee (JPC) examining the allocation of 2G spectrum is likely to shut the door on the opposition's demand that finance minister P Chidambaram be questioned by it. Senior BJP leaders, who are part of the JPC, walked out the session today demanding to know when Mr Chidambaram, as well as the prime minister and then-telecom minister A Raja, will be summoned. The BJP members also called the JPC chairman, P C Chacko of the Congress a "dictator" and said that the committee is likely to be "misused".
Mr Raja was among others jailed for what was called the 2G scam, where instead of auctioning spectrum, it was given to a favoured few after secretly changing rules. The national auditor had pointed to a Rs 1.76 lakh crore loss to the country in the scam and the opposition used it to whip the government with, much like the coal block allocation scam.
On Tuesday, then finance secretary and now Reserve Bank of India governor R Subba Rao deposed before the JPC. He said that his position on a finance ministry note of March 25, 2011 that said that the department of economic affairs could have insisted on an auction was the same as Mr Chidambaram's: neither of them agree with it.
On the basis of this, Mr Chacko said that there was no need to summon Mr Chidambaram, who is back as finance minister, since Mr Rao and his position are the same.
The BJP is likely to now go on a stronger offensive, since it wants to hold the governnment to its word of a 'fair probe' into the 2008 2G scam. BJP member on the JPC Yashwant Sinha said that his party will have to decide whether it wants to stay in the JPC any longer. "There is no point staying in the JPC with the manner in which the chairman is concealing information," he said to reporters after walking out the committee's session. "We do not have the heart to continue."
Earlier on Tuesday, BJP members of the JPC including Ravi Shankar Prasad and Mr Sinha told Mr Chacko that till the the PM and Finance Minister are not added to the list of witnesses, they will not participate in the committee's sessions.
Last month, the BJP members of the committee had threatened to quit. They say that the PM and Mr Chidambaram must explain why they were unable to intervene when former Telecom Minister A Raja engineered and executed the second-generation or 2G scam - refusing to auction spectrum, Mr Raja followed a first-come-first-serve policy to award licenses for mobile operators. He then allegedly tweaked the process to help some companies jump to the head of the long queue.