2G case: BJP clashes with PC Chacko, ‘withdraws’ from JPC

Four BJP members ‘withdrew’ from the joint parliament committee (JPC) meeting on the 2G spectrum scam over the issue of calling prime minister Manmohan Singh and finance minister P Chidambaram as witnesses. The BJP members who walked out were Yashwant Sinha, Gopinath Munde, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Devender Pradhan.

Sinha said that committee chairman PC Chacko behaved in a dictatorial fashion and stopped Ravi Shankar Prasad and Gopinath Munde from raising the issue of witnesses with a rude ‘No’. Sinha said Chacko behaved more like a Congress spokesman than as the chairman of a parliamentary panel.

However, Chacko said, “It is a political decision taken by the BJP for political reasons. It has nothing to do with the proceedings of the committee. They wanted to throttle the proceedings.” He also clarified that though the norm in parliamentary panels is that decisions are left to the discretion of the chairman, he had decided on a majority decision as a way out of the logjam over the issue of calling Singh and Chidambaram as witnesses.

Chacko acknoweldged that there had been total unanimity in the working of the committee for the first 43 meetings and trouble broke out only in the last two meetings. He denied that the Congress members in the committee used ‘abusive’ language against the BJP colleagues.

Sinha also said that they – the BJP members of the JPC – had decided to confer with the party president Nitin Gadkari and other leaders on whether to remain in the JPC or opt out after the September 20 Bharat Bandh. He acknowledged that the JPC was formed at the insistence of the BJP but said that it was not serving the purpose because Chacko wants to put a ‘purdah’ on the truth instead of exposing it.

Sinha recalled that he had been a member of the JPC headed by Ram Niwas Mirdha, a Congressman, which had looked into the Harshad Mehta-triggered stock market scam in 1993, and he said Mirdha had taken the opposition members on board and had asked Jaswant Singh, another member of the JPC, to write the large part of the report while he (Sinha) was asked to do a chapter related to the involvement of a bank. He said that was the kind of cooperative spirit that prevailed then because of Mirdha’s attitude was in contrast to Chacko’s. Asked why the BJP are not willing to stay in the JPC and append their dissent notes in  the final report, Sinha said the BJP members would present their dissent note

in public to the people at the appropriate time.