Note that UPA-II has a problem

Today is an important day for the scam-hit UPA-II, especially the Congress. The finance ministry’s note questioning P Chidambaram’s role in the 2G spectrum allocation has brought to the fore differences between and ambitions of the party’s top two veteran leaders.

The war between finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and home minister Chidambaram, following Subramanian Swamy’s “expose” of a letter, purportedly written by Mukherjee to prime minister Manmohan Singh in March 2011, has placed the government in a bind. The letter suggested that Chidambaram, as the finance minister in 2008, could have prevented the 2G scam if he had insisted on auctioning the spectrum.

Matters will become clear after Singh returns to the country as both the ministers have indicated that they would speak to the media only after talking with the prime minister.

Also, the Supreme Court will resume hearing Swamy’s plea in the 2G case on Tuesday. Swamy is expected to argue his case in court around two in the afternoon. The controversial Janata Party president said late on Monday night that he was confident of a progress in the case as nobody had contested the documents, including the politically damaging finance ministry note, he had filed in court.

The note, picked up by the media and the opposition, has cast a shadow on Chidambaram and the UPA-II government.

Mukherjee who was in Washington to attend the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, met Singh in New York on Sunday while opposition parties in the country kept demanding Chidambaram’s resignation or a CBI inquiry into his role.

Though he chose not to say anything specific in the US, once he returned to the country on Monday, Mukherjee told reporters that he would hold a “full-fledged press conference” once the prime minister returns and the party has held a meeting. While the veteran crisis manager kept stressing that Chidambaram was a “valuable colleague” and “a pillar of strength”, the man in the dock, Chidambaram himself, remained tight-lipped.

On Monday evening, he met Congress president Sonia Gandhi briefly, but chose not to speak to reporters. Soon after he left 10 Janpath, Mukherjee arrived. He was in a closed door meeting with Gandhi for little over an hour. Though it is not clear what transpired at the meeting, the fact that Gandhi, who is recuperating after a surgery in the US, had to intervene in the clash of the titans speaks volumes about the current mess that the UPA II, especially the Congress, finds itself in.

Though TV news channels tried to decipher the goings-on and gauge the extent of damage, top Congress leaders came out in support of both Chidambaram and Mukherjee. Union law minister Salman Khurshid said the “matter was not so big” as it had been projected by the media. He said Mukherjee had not written the note and that a lower-level official had prepared it. Khurshid even advised the media to “look for something else” because there was nothing in the 2G note.

Party spokesperson Rashid Alvi criticised the BJP for its observation that the right place for Chidambaram was the Tihar jail. “The BJP is acting like the applicant, the prosecutor and the judge… all rolled into one,” he said.

After a couple of TV channels started flashing that Chidambaram had offered to resign when he met Sonia Gandhi, Congress leaders denied any such development. Late in the night, Chidambaram found support from unlikely quarters — the DMK. Party patriarch M Karunanidhi, who till now has dropped enough hints that he is upset with the Congress in connection with the arrests of his daughter Kanimozhi and former telecom minister A Raja in the 2G scam, came out in his support.