'Govt taking talks backward'

“We are back to square one,” said Anna Hazare’s close aide and eminent lawyer Prashant Bhushan, after Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee told him and other representatives of the fasting Gandhian that the Government could not short-circuit the parliamentary process to accept his demand.

“There is a difference of day and night between yesterday and today. There has been a change of attitude. The kind of concern they were expressing yesterday was not visible today. It is a totally retrograde. We are back to the drafting stage,” added Kiran Bedi, a former police officer and another aide of Hazare. Bhushan, Bedi and Right To Information activist Arvind Kejriwal were talking to mediapersons after meeting Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, whom the Government on Tuesday put forward as the chief interlocutor for talks with Team Anna.

“We are quite disappointed after today’s meeting. It seems we have to start it from the scratch again,” said Bhushan.

Law Minister Salman Khurshid and Congress MP from East Delhi Sandip Dikshit were also present in the meeting. “They (the representatives of the Government) were listening to us yesterday (when Team Anna first met Mukherjee). Today, they made us to listen,” said Kejriwal, known as a hardliner among the leaders spearheading the movement.
“We are back to the position where we were two days ago when no meetings had taken place,” he added.