REJECT JPC report on 2G spectrum scam: BJP to LS Speaker

Yashwant Sinha, Bharatiya Janata Party’s member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on 2G spectrum scam, on Saturday wrote to Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar requesting her to reject the panel's report.

Sinha claimed that JPC chairperson P C Chacko had "blatantly violated" rules and norms in finalising the document.

The six BJP leaders (including Sinha), who were part of the JPC on 2G spectrum scam, had given a dissent note on the panel's report and made it public, saying they feared it would be deleted by Chacko on grounds of being ‘unparliamentary’.

Referring to the letter, Sinha requested that Kumar reject the report.

"My request to you, therefore, is to reject the report even at this late stage in order to ensure that no permanent damage is done to the institution of JPC, Parliament itself and to the parliamentary system of democracy in our country," Sinha said in his letter.

In the October 9 letter to Kumar, the six BJP leaders -- Jaswant Singh, Gopinath Munde, Harin Pathak, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Dharmendra Pradhan and Sinha -- had alleged the JPC meeting on September 27 was a "farce".

"We apprehended that the Chairman might edit and mutilate our Note of Dissent," Sinha said, adding that on October 25, he got a letter from the JPC Secretariat informing him that the Opposition's dissent note has been deleted.

Insisting that the opposition's "worst fears had come true", Sinha said, "It has been confirmed that the Chairman of JPC, P C Chacko, has blatantly violated all the rules and norms in finalising this report, submitting it to you, printing it and circulating it and deleting portions from our Note of Dissent."

The BJP leader cited rules and emphasised that there is nothing in the Dissent Note that could be termed "unparliamentary, irrelevant or otherwise inappropriate".

"The chairman, therefore, had no right to expunge the portions of our Dissent Note which he has expunged," he said.

Sinha also asked the Speaker to apply her mind to the issue and order restoration of the deleted portions.