2G taint on Chidambaram: Jaitley hits out at PM, point by point

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday criticised Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for shielding Union Home Minister P Chidambaram for his alleged involvement in the 2G spectrum allocation scam.

Addressing media persons here, senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley said: "Yesterday, when the prime minister returned from US, he made three main points. All these three points show that the country's problems are nowhere in his sight. His first statement was that I have full confidence in P Chidambaram and that I will protect my ministers.”

Emphasising that it would have been better if the prime minister had protected the truth instead of protecting the tainted minister, Jaitley said: "Dr Singh has never answered any questions related to the revelation of this note."

Contradicting Singh's second point that the PMO was well coordinated, Jaitley said that the PMO has dissensions, which was evident in their handling of the Anna Hazare stir, which showed that they are not well connected.

Reacting to Singh's third point that opposition especially BJP is trying to destabilise the government, Jaitley said: "The prime minister has distanced himself from ground realities... he is living in denial. We don't have the numbers to destabilise the government, and we don't even need to do so."

"The UPA Government had a crisis of leadership and would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and under the liability of its own image," he added.

Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj said: "The prime minister had vowed to take steps against corruption, but within four months, the Congress changed their aim of protecting the country from corruption."

Swaraj said the note dated March 25 that came in front of the nation through the medium of RTI, said in each paragraph that Chidambaram knew about every development of the 2G spectrum allocation.

"Thus, he is as responsible in the issue as A Raja," she added.

Swaraj also alleged that Central Bureau of Investigation is helping Chidambaram.

"We have earlier said that CBI takes steps only to protect the Congress. Their stand of not interrogating Chidambaram is not a surprise to us. CBI indeed stands for 'Congress Bachao Institution," she added.

Chidambaram came under fire after a 11-page note, prepared by a senior bureaucrat in the finance ministry and ‘seen by’ Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, suggested that Chidambaram could have acted more stridently in 2008 on the spectrum pricing issue, when he was the country's finance minister.

The March 25 note to the PMO from the finance ministry says Chidambaram could have "stuck to the stand" of an auction of the highly valuable spectrum.

The note added: "It may be mentioned that while the UAS licenses were signed between February 27 and March 7, 2008, spectrum allocations were done starting only in April, 2008, almost four months after the LoIs were issued. However, these were not charged (beyond the normal spectrum usage charges) since there was consensus, at the levels of the Ministers concerned, that spectrum beyond the 'start up' levels only should be charged."

The note came into the public domain under the Right to Information Act petition filed by Vivek Garg, a prominent activist.

The telecom scam, one of India's biggest graft cases ever, may have cost 39.57 billion dollars in revenue to the public exchequer as per the Comptroller and Auditor General.