Meira returns PAC report on 2G scam
Cong claims its stand vindicated
Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar has returned the controversial report on the 2G scam that Public Accounts Committee chairman and Bharatiya Janata Party MP Murli Manohar Joshi had submitted to her at the end of his previous tenure on April 30 last.
Joshi’s report on the alleged scam in the 2007 allocation of 2G spectrum had been sharply critical about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, his office and the then finance minister P Chidambaram. It had come also down heavily on former telecom minister A Raja.
Sources said on Tuesday that the Speaker had returned the report to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chairman.
Congress MPs on the PAC welcomed the decision of the Speaker and said it vindicated their stand that the report had no legal validity because 11 of the 21 members of the committee had rejected it.
Objections to report
The report had been caught in a dispute as a majority of the PAC members—mostly from the Congress and DMK—had raised strong objections to its content. They sought to record their votes to reject the report in a chaotic meeting of the panel on April 28, a day after its draft had got leaked to a section of the media.
Joshi, however, had maintained that the recording of votes by the dissenting members of the PAC had been illegal and invalid as the rule book had no provision for rejecting the report.
The BJP leader had then sent the report to the Lok Sabha Speaker’s office. He had told journalists that he expected the Speaker to table the report in the House.
Parliamentary rules, however, stipulate that a committee report can be tabled in both Houses only after it is approved by the panel that prepared the document.
Congress MP K S Rao had met the Speaker and given her a note on the happenings at the PAC meetings and apprised her of what happened on April 28 and earlier.
The PAC was later reconstituted with Murli Manohar Joshi reappointed chairman. Rao and several other members of the old panel were also retained.
“The so-called report has no legal validity at all. The matter has now come to close with the Speaker returning it to the PAC chairman,” Rao told Deccan Herald on Tuesday.
Joshi on Sunday accused the Congress of creating hurdles to the PAC probe into the 2G spectrum scam. He alleged that the Congress had tried to stop the presentation of the draft report on the 2G scam. Joshi asserted that he would continue the probe and expose the “wrongdoings” of the Union Government.
“Since the finger of suspicion was pointed towards the prime minister and the finance minister, who kept mum despite knowing everything related to the 2G spectrum, the Congress rejected the report,” the BJP leader told reporters in Dehradun.
