UPA eyes only on Fin Bill; Chacko plea to cool Oppn: Panel

The UPA government is keen only on the passage of the Finance Bill and JPC chairman Chacko's agreeing to amend the JPC's report is a strategy to cool the Opposition's temper, concur political analysts AK Bhattacharya, editor, Business Standard, CNN-IBN's Bhupendra Chaubey and CNBC-TV18's economic and political editor, Siddharth Zarabi.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, the experts add that the Finance Bill will be passed thanks to the Parliamentary tradition that allows the passage of a Money Bill despite the approval of the Upper House. Below is the edited transcript of the discussion on CNBC-TV18 Q: How do you think the UPA government will deal with host of problems in its path- the coal scam, the protest against the JPC, the Saradha chit fund scam and JPC chairman Chacko agreeing to amend his report to pacify the Opposition? Chaubey: The only thing that is really working on the mind of the government is the passage of the Finance Bill. I think the government believes it needs to offer something to pacify the Opposition and cool tempers. So, I suspect JPC chairman PC Chacko’s latest response of willing to amend the report or examine the questions raised by the Opposition is a part of a strategy of quid pro quo. Q: Do you believe that this is filibustering on the part of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)? Do you really believe that the Finance Bill is under threat? Bhattacharya: Of course not. The Finance Bill can never be under threat for the simple reason –Parliamentary traditions make it very clear that a Money Bill need not necessarily be passed by the Upper House. So as long as the Congress manages to get it passed by the Lok Sabha, the Finance Bill will never be under threat. All that the Rajya Sabha members can do is send it back. It is a process that takes some time to clear. Q: While the Budget or the finance bill may be safe, what about the future of all the pending legislation? There was hope when the finance minister on his road shows had assured investors that Land Bill, pension, insurance all of this would perhaps go through in this session of Parliament. Should we at least just very clearly put to rest any sort of hope and possibility of any of that sort of business getting done this session? Bhattacharya: Yes, that is right. I think the finance bill is safe not because the Congress has got its act together, but because of the parliamentary tradition in place. As far as the other bills that you mentioned, I don’t see much action on all those fronts. I don't see the Land Bill coming up because the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is saying that the deal cannot happen at this stage because the Congress leadership has not kept its part of the promise. So, naturally in the remaining few days of the Parliament, the resumed session or the Budget session you won’t see much action on any of those bills that the government has promised to the nation. Q: Very crucial to this strategy of quid pro quo is the role that PC Chacko will play and the role that this joint parliamentary committee (JPC) will play in trying to break the current impasse you have gone over that JPC report. Now, that PC Chacko is saying that I am willing to look at amending certain portions of it, what do we make of this and what do we make of the BJPs position in all of this? Zarabi: As far as amending the JPC report is concerned, I really don’t know what to make of PC Chacko’s comments because if the draft report is anything to go by the 90-odd pages which are the observations and the summary findings and recommendations is a complete scathing indictment of what the Vajpayee government did.
It quotes page upon page of evidence, materials, annexures, documents, letters which seem to suggest that what the Vajpayee government did was to give away a huge amount of national revenue-Rs 42,000 crore - at one place. That is not something that can be dropped because if that is to be dropped then what you are left with is the report questioning the credentials of then department of telecommunication (DoT) secretary DS Mathur during A Raja's tenure sighting KM Chandrasekhar’s observations that the telecom secretary did not propose a revision in licence fee. Q: What you have pointed out is interesting. You are saying that substantial portion of those 90 pages is about the Vajpayee Government and is about the role that the national democratic alliance (NDA) actually played in this whole issue of spectrum allocation. So that perhaps could be the quid pro quo when Chacko talks about amending the report? Zarabi: The issue earlier was that you have named Vajpayee. Vajpayee is not named in person. But the entire thrust of the report is to levelise between what happened in 2008 and what happened pre-2004. If you take that away then is a serious contradiction. Think of it in another term, I was talking to a senior United Progressive Alliance (UPA) minister.
He said that if our report says that there was no loss as the report goes on to discredit the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAGs) theory, there was no loss due to our decisions, then how can we suggest that the decisions by the Vajpayee Government actually led to a loss. So, I don’t think in this shape the BJP can at all ever agree to any amendments, either this report goes through or it doesn’t go through, which is what the Congress did exactly to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report of Murli Manohar Joshi two years back.