JPC meet on 2G allocation is a kangaroo court: BJP

All the six Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members on Wednesday walked out of a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) meeting on 2G spectrum allocation. The BJP members want Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Finance Minister P Chidambaram to be called by the JPC to depose in connection with the 2G spectrum allocation.
The party has threatened that if the Prime Minister, Finance Minister, Pulok Chatterjee (Principal Secretary to Prime Minister's Office) and TKA Nair (Advisor to the Prime Minister) are not called to depose before the JPC, then its MPs would withdraw from the panel altogether.

BJP MPs Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Dharmendra Pradhan and Gopinath Munde walked out after calling the JPC a kangaroo court.

Yashwant Sinha and Ravi Shankar Prasad accused the Congress of creating a hostile environment during the meeting. "We had to walkout of the JPC meeting after the unparliamentary behaviour of Congress members in the meeting. Foul language was used against us. We had only asked that the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister should be called to the JPC," said Yashwant Sinha.

"It was amazing to see the behaviour of first time MPs of Congress using such language against us. A hostile atmosphere was created so we had no option but to walk out," said Ravi Shankar Prasad.

However, The move is seen as a pressure tactics by the BJP, which can claim that the JPC does not represent Parliament as its members are not a part of the panel. The party's strategy is to keep up the pressure on Manmohan Singh on not only 2G but also on the coal blocks allocation report, and paralyse the government

According to the Comptroller and Auditor General the 2G spectrum allocation caused a presumptive loss of Rs 1.76 lakh crore to the state exchequer.

Former telecom minister and DMK MP A Raja is accused in the 2G case and is currently out on bail after spending more than a year in Delhi's Tihar Jail. The alleged spectrum allocation scam has been probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).