All-party meet on 2G scam fails to end deadlock

An all-party meeting called to end the deadlock in Parliament on the second-generation (2G) mobile telephony spectrum scam failed today as the opposition stuck to its demand for joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probe and rejected the government's proposal for attaching multi-disciplinary probe teams with the public accounts committee (PAC) to go into the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) report.

After the hour-long meeting, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee told the opposition parties that he would get back to them after consulting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Mukherjee had called the leaders of all parties to discuss ways to end the logjam over the 2G mobile bandwidth probe because of which arliament has remained paralysed ever since the winter session began on November 9 as the opposition has been insisting on setting up of a joint parliamentary committee to go into the scam.

During the meeting, the government proposed that the teams of multiple agencies probing the 2G mobile bandwidth scam could be attached with the PAC, leader of the opposition in Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj said.

This was rejected by the opposition parties in unison as they stuck to their demand for JPC, she said.

"We said that we will not accept (the government proposal)," Swaraj said, a view echoed by representatives of other opposition parties who attended the meeting.