BJP urges LS speaker to reject JPC report on 2G

After Left parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has requested Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar to reject the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) report on 2G spectrum allocation, accusing panel chairperson P C Chacko of blatantly violating rules.

In a letter to Meira Kumar, JPC member Yashwant Sinha said: “My request to you, therefore, is to reject the report even at this late stage in order to ensure that no permanent damage is done to the institution of the JPC, Parliament itself and to the parliamentary system of democracy in our country.

It has been confirmed that the Chairman of JPC, P C Chacko, has blatantly violated all the rules and norms in finalising this report, submitting it to you, printing it and circulating it and deleting portions from our (opposition’s) note of dissent,” said Sinha, emphasising that the opposition’s “worst fears have come true.”

Sinha and five other BJP members of the JPC had given a dissent note on the panel’s finding. Fearing that their dissent may not be included in the final report, the leaders made it public as they suspected that Chacko held it back arguing that those were un-parliamentary.

The six protesting BJP members—Jaswant Singh, Gopinath Munde, Harin Pathak, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Dharmendra Pradhan and Sinha—wrote to the Speaker dubbing the September 27 JPC meeting a “farce”.

“We apprehended that the chairman might edit and mutilate our note of dissent,” Sinha said. He said that on October 25, he received a letter from the JPC Secretariat informing that the Opposition’s dissent note was not accepted.

Communist Party of India MP Gurudas Dasgupta had also taken exception to Chacko omitting his arguments from the report and had expressed his displeasure on the way the JPC chief had conducted the final outcome.

He had described the JPC report as nothing but a “cover-up story” as he had questioned the panel for not looking into losses incurred on selling spectrum at a cheap price and exonerating the prime minister.