JOIN US“They made a joke of it,” senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha told reporters at a press conference here.
"PAC is a committee of the Lok Sabha, only a Lok Sabha member and a member of main opposition party can be its head. Soz, a member of the Rajya Sabha, from the ruling party, was elected the chairman," Sinha said.
In an unseemly turn of events Thursday, out of the 21-member PAC, 11 members from the Congress, DMK, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party rejected an interim report on the 2G scam and demanded PAC chairman and BJP member Murli Manohar Joshi's resignation.
The report had pulled up Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his "indirect" role in the spectrum allocation scandal.
An angry Joshi walked out of the meeting, after which the protesting members elected Congress MP Saifuddin Soz as the chairman. Protesting members blamed Joshi for asking questions first.
But Sinha said those who objected have not read the rules.
“In other committees, we give a chance to other members to ask questions first, but in the PAC, it's clearly written that the chairman puts the questions in the first instance. Thereafter opportunity is given to other members. Those who object (asking) why Joshi asked the question first have not studied the rules,” he said.