Cong, DMK take on Joshi in PAC war

The Congress and the DMK today declared war on BJP veteran and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Murali Manohar Joshi dubbing his draft report on the 2G scam “biased” and “malicious”.

Ahead of the final meeting of the PAC tomorrow where the 2G report will be placed for approval, the Congress and DMK demanded that Joshi should step down from the chairmanship of the panel.

The moot question is whether the PAC draft report, which has indicted the Prime Minister’s Office, the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram and former telecom minister A Raja, be approved by the committee in its current form.

Top Congress leaders like Pranab Mukherjee, P Chidambaram, Ahmed Patel and others sat for a strategy meeting late this evening to formulate the government’s stand in the wake of the PAC draft report on the 2G scam.

The rule book of the Parliament says: “The reports of the Public Accounts Committee are adopted by consensus among members. Accordingly, there is no system of appending minutes of dissent to the report.”

Clearly there was no hope of a consensus on the current draft report. Joshi-loyalists in the committee suggest that former PAC chairman Buta Singh had, in fact, not consulted the members and even without the permission of the Lok Sabha Speaker had tabled a report of the PAC on the import of coffins for Kargil war martyrs scam.

Congress and DMK members, who had resorted to disruptions to prevent the PAC from completing its hearings in the last few meetings, today made their dissent public and rejected the report as “unilateral and undemocratic”. K S Rao, a Congress member of the PAC said: “Joshi has malafide intentions. DMK and Congress members were not consulted.”

Although the committee has scheduled a meeting tomorrow, Rao claimed that they did not know why the meeting had been called. Joshi loyalists said the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting was known to everyone. Apart from the adoption of the report, a photo opportunity was scheduled for tomorrow.

The Congress is also trying to garner support from the Samajwadi Party and BSP camp to stop Joshi from presenting the report before the Parliament.