Even as the Joint Parliamentary Committee on 2G spectrum allocation on Friday adopted its final report, a bevy of dissent notes have been submitted to JPC Chairman P.C. Chacko.
With representatives of the CPI(M) and AIADMK having already submitted their notes and members of the CPI, BJP, BJD and DMK in the process, this report is on course to bagging an unprecedented number of individual dissent notes for any such JPC report tabled so far.
In his dissent note, CPI Lok Sabha member Gurudas Dasgupta blamed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and said they were “morally and legally” responsible for causing enormous losses to the exchequer.
Terming the report, adopted with a voting pattern of 16:11, a “cover-up” operation, Mr. Dasgupta said “a fraud has been played, facts have been suppressed and it is biased to favour them [PM and FM]. Parliament’s mandate has also been violated”.
Mr. Dasgupta alleged that Dr. Singh “chose to stay silent” on a note prepared by his Cabinet Secretary and “took no action on it”. The Cabinet Secretary had said that the actions of the Telecom Department (DoT) were illegal and would cause a loss of over Rs.30,000 crore to the exchequer.
Mr. Chidambaram too, he alleged, chose not to act on the feedback given by his ministry officials, first interacting with then Communications Minister A. Raja on January 30, 2008, to discuss the issue of pricing.
“… Mr. Raja [was] of course the villain of the piece, but he certainly would not have been able to do it had he not got the tacit support of the entire government machinery,” Mr. Dasgupta said.
“[The] nation suffered a loss because of the government’s failure to act. It was not just the DoT which executed the illegalities and perpetrated losses, it was also tacit support from the other wings of the government which allowed the DoT to perpetuate its illegalities,” he said.
