Congress plays down Pranab letter episode

Congress on Tuesday insisted that there was “nothing new” in the surfacing of Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s explanatory note of September 26 to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, wherein Mukherjee put the blame for the original controversial March 25 office memorandum, on the PMO.

Mukherjee in his note had made clear that the office memo on the 2G scam was written in "consultation" with Cabinet Secretariat and the PMO and the sentence which appeared to blame Chidambaram was “revised” after consultation with the Cabinet Secretariat and the PMO. Incidentally, Mukherjee’s met both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday.

Stressing that there was no controversy, Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said, “Circumstances surrounding the note have been discussed to death. We must keep in mind that the note is reiteration of what happened between December 2003 and February 2011.

If at all there is any concern with regard to interpretation and sequence of the matter in the letter, then the judgement should be left to the JPC, which has a mandate to look into the entire gamut of the spectrum allocation from 1998 to 2009.” Tewari reiterated, “When you have a JPC, PAC and the court looking into the matter, rather than reading out judgements on an issue, allow the agencies to come out with their final findings.” Responding to whether the JPC will be looking into the September 26 letter of Mukherjee, Tewari said, in the “course of its deliberations, it is obviously going to look into these matters.”

He added, “Let us not come to premature judgements and allow the JPC to complete the probe.”

The Finance Ministry note of March 25 which had become public through an RTI query, had suggested the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram could have averted the 2G scam in 2008, if he insisted on auctioning of spectrum. Following the unearthing of this note, the UPA lunged into a crisis with two of its senior most ministers, Mukherjee and Chidambaram pitted against each other.

It was in such a scenario, when both the PM and Mukerjee were in the US that the latter, rushed from Washington to New York to confer with the prime minister. Mukherjee's explanatory letter of September 26 bwas written on his return, with a copy to the Congress President Sonia Gandhi.

Subsequently, it was Gandhi’s intervention, which saw the UPA present a united front on September 29 with the two senior ministers standing next to each other, declaring that the matter was closed.