The inclusion of two Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) heavyweights, the former Union Ministers Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha, in the Joint Parliamentary Committee examining the 2G spectrum scam is “untenable,” senior Congress sources said here, a day after the names of the 20 JPC members from the Lok Sabha were announced.
The Congress objections stem from the fact that Mr. Singh headed a Group of Ministers on the Union Telecom Ministry and Mr. Sinha had been Finance Minister during the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance's years in power at the Centre — 1998 to 2004, a period the JPC will be scrutinising as part of its mandate.
This meant, these sources said, that there would be a different sort of “conflict of interest, shorn of monetary concerns,” between the roles the two BJP leaders performed as Ministers at the time and as JPC members now examining “policy prescriptions and their interpretation by successive governments… in the allocation and pricing of telecom licences and spectrum between 1998 and 2009.”
Therefore, in the interest of the country's “solid and rich parliamentary tradition,” the highly placed sources said, Mr. Singh and Mr. Sinha should not be in the JPC at all or, at the very least, “recuse themselves when the JPC discusses the role of the BJP-led NDA between 1998 and 2004. Indeed, they could instead be summoned by the JPC to give evidence before the panel on the NDA years.
The UPA government has, however, decided not to raise the matter at this stage. But the sources said it was likely to be raised by non-BJP JPC members after the entire JPC was constituted on March 1, when the 10 Rajya Sabha members and the chairperson of the JPC were named as well.
