Hours after walking out of a Joint
Parliamentary Committee (JPC) meeting for the second consecutive time on
Tuesday, senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha on Tuesday announced the withdrawal
of BJP members from the panel probing the 2G spectrum allocation.
Stating that a decision on formally
quitting the panel would be taken by the party president after September 20, he
accused JPC head PC Chacko of behaving like a Congress spokesperson instead of
a committee chairman.
Sinha alleged that when BJP members
sought his permission to speak on the list of witnesses to be called on
Tuesday, Chacko denied them permission — stating that RBI governor D Subbarao
was to make a presentation. The party interpreted this as an attempt by Chacko
to prevent the Prime Minister, finance minister, former PM aide TKA Nair and
others from appearing before the committee. When Sinha then wrote to Chacko,
asking him not to sweep the witness list under the carpet any longer, the
latter replied that he was in the process of preparing it.
Following this, Chacko accused the
BJP of coming to the meeting with a plan and trying to implement it. Stating
that including the names of the PM or finance minister in the list of witnesses
was a decision required to taken democratically by the committee, he said, “The
BJP members returned to the meeting on their own and I did not assure anything
to them. They came with an agenda and executed it. Their demand was totally
unreasonable.”
“We withdrew from the JPC today. We
propose to take up this issue with the party president immediately after the
Bharat Bandh, whether we continue in the committee or not,” Sinha said. “The
final decision will be taken after the 20th, but we have no faith in the manner
of functioning of the JPC… (Chacko) behaves like a Congress spokesperson, not a
JPC chairman.”
He said that Chacko denied many BJP
leaders, including Ravi Shankar Prasad, Gopinath Munde and Dharmendra Pradhan,
permission to speak.
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