The Bharatiya Janata Party is happy that one more step has been taken in bringing the guilty to justice in the 2G spectrum allocation saga with the courts refusing bail to DMK MP Kanimozhi, who has now been lodged in jail. However, it did not want to give any credit to the government's non-partisan role but felt this was made possible only because the case was being monitored by the Supreme Court.
Party spokesperson Prakash Javadekar said the results of investigations into the 2G matter were “visible” only because the Supreme Court was monitoring the investigation. Without the eagle eye of the court, nothing of this sort would have happened. In fact, he demanded a similar Supreme Court-supervised investigation into the corruption cases related to the Commonwealth Games and the implementation of the Shunglu Committee recommendations on this subject.
On the erroneous “most wanted” list, Mr. Javadekar said the Home Ministry was not just a post office where lists of the terrorists arrived and were posted to Pakistan. The Home Minister would have to take responsibility for the goof-ups that have undermined India's efforts to get the international community to sit up and take note that men wanted for terrorism here were moving about freely in Pakistan, the Bharatiya Janata Party said here on Friday as it sharpened its attack on P. Chidambaram, even asking for his resignation.
The party said the suspension or transfer of one or two sub-inspectors was not enough. “The buck stops at Mr. Chidambaram's door.”
On the “wanted” list error, the BJP accepted that when Mr. Chidambaram was put in charge of Home Affairs following the Mumbai terrorist attack, there was hope and expectation that he would read the riot act to various agencies and improve the internal security scenario. However, more recently it became obvious that he had not been able to implement his ideas and get the various agencies to coordinate and pool information, leading to embarrassing errors of the kind that have turned up in the list of 50 “most wanted” men the government claimed were in Pakistan when in fact at least two of them were found to be in Mumbai, one on bail and the other in jail. “India has been shamed,” Mr. Javadekar said.
