Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Lal Krishna Advani on Tuesday expressed “grave” concern at media reports of alleged tapping of more than a lakh telephones across the country. The matter constituted a “crisis of democracy” and a thorough probe was needed, he said at a rally here on Tuesday.
Mr. Advani also demanded that the whole gamut of recent corruption cases, which allegedly involved some Union Ministers, be investigated by a joint parliamentary committee.
BJP president Nitin Gadkari and Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley slammed the Union government for its refusal to reveal the names of black money account holders in foreign banks and “inability” to rein in the spiralling prices.
Phones of political leaders could be tapped only with the permission of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Mr. Advani noted. “The Centre should reveal on whose permission so many phones were tapped and also disclose the identities of persons whose phones were tapped… this is a crisis of democracy and freedom of the people. The country has still not forgotten the days of Emergency in the ‘70s,” he said.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Jaitley said the matter was tantamount to misuse of power by the Centre and the States. He demanded a clarification from the Centre spelling out the number of phones actually tapped and the reasons for it.
The Opposition had received an indication that the Centre might finally agree to a JPC probe into the 2G spectrum allocation scam. “When we demand a JPC, we mean that all financial scams — especially the Adarsh Housing Society and Commonwealth Games scams — should be brought under its ambit. The Opposition will not be satisfied otherwise,” Mr. Jaitley said.
While Mr. Gadkari said the Centre was averse to naming the black money account holders in foreign banks because it wanted to “save its own Ministers' faces,” senior party leader Rajnath Singh demanded a clarification from United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi.
A demand for a clarification from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the S-band allocation controversy was also raised.
No tie-up in West Bengal
Claiming to be the only “viable” alternative in West Bengal, the BJP leadership said here that the party would field candidates in all the 294 Assembly constituencies in the coming elections. It also ruled out the possibility of a tie-up with either the Communist Party of India Party (Marxist) or the Trinamool Congress.
While Mr. Advani slammed the Trinamool Congress by asking people against voting for a party that “regularly switches political allegiance,” the party's central observer for West Bengal said the CPI(M) and the Trinamool were “two sides of the same coin.”
A meeting of the BJP's national office-bearers was held here on the day to take stock of the party's preparedness for the coming Assembly elections in four States and a Union Territory. The meeting was followed by a mass rally.
Chief Ministers of Karnataka, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh were also present at both venues.
Addressing the rally, Mr. Gadkari challenged Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee to resign from the cabinet to prove her credibility or else shoulder the responsibility of the alleged rampant corruption indulged in by other Ministers in the UPA government.
Criticising the Left Front government of having done nothing for the development of the State in the past 34 years, Mr. Jaitley alleged that the State government had destroyed the thriving industrial sector that once existed here and this had resulted in widespread unemployment.
