The current controversy over the role of Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram in the 2G spectrum allocation case will continue to fester till Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee return to the country, senior party sources said. No decision on the issue will be taken till the top Congress leaders — represented in the party's Core Group — meet here after the Prime Minister returns on Tuesday.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi has not yet spoken on the subject, nor indicated her mind, even though she is meeting, on an average, two to three persons every day, the sources said. They stressed she would not do anything till Dr. Singh returns.
All eyes are now on what transpires at the damage control meeting Dr. Singh and Mr. Mukherjee will have in New York on Sunday.
Meanwhile, even as senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha frontally attacked the government on Saturday, demanding Mr. Chidambaram be sent to jail and accusing the Prime Minister of protecting him as it would otherwise leave him exposed, Dr. Singh continued to publicly defend all his Ministers. In the last few days, he has repeatedly said that he has full faith in all of them. After his first statement defending Mr. Chidambaram, shortly after the story broke here on Friday, the Prime Minister said in New York: “The Opposition's role is to oppose and there is nothing unusual in it. My Ministers enjoy my confidence.” After delivering his speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Saturday, Dr. Singh made it clear again that there was no question of any of his Ministers resigning: “I will continue to defend my Ministers. All my Ministers continue to enjoy my confidence,” he said.
Back in Delhi, a senior party functionary told The Hindu : “I don't think there is any basis for the insinuations being made against Mr. Pranab Mukhejee [that he was trying to embarrass Mr. Chidambaram],” he said, stressing: “One has to ultimately depend on the bureaucracy [a reference to the controversial note sent from the Finance Ministry to the PMO] — he [Mr. Mukherjee] may have just glanced at it.”
Officially, the party has defended all three men, the Prime Minister and his Ministers for Home and Finance, insisting that the matter is not just sub judice, but that a Joint Parliamentary Committee is investigating the scam. On Saturday, party general secretary Digvijay Singh also came to Mr. Chidambaram's defence, saying that the reason for the BJP-RSS combine attacking the Home Minister was because it was on his watch that investigations in terror cases, involving Sangh parivar members, had been speeded up.
So, as the party tried to grapple with this latest crisis in the Prime Minister's absence, the publication of a letter written by the former Telecom Minister, Dayanidhi Maran, to the Prime Minister, seeking dilution of the 2G spectrum allocation policy, added to the government's woes. Questions are now also being sought on whether the terms of reference of the Group of Ministers on allocation and pricing of spectrum were modified after the receipt of this letter.
