Telecom JPC meets, worry at PAC probe

Joshi says he will proceed with his inquiry.

With two all-party probes by separate Parliament committees into the telecom spectrum controversy, friction and keep-off-my-work exchanges seem to have begun.

The Public Accounts Committee has been probing the issue, based on the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report, for quite some time. It is chaired by Murli Manohar Joshi, the Bharatiya Janata Party senior.

And, on Thursday, after an intense political controversy, a Joint Parliamentary Committee has begun its work, holding its first meeting. This one is chaired by another senior, but of the ruling Congress party, P C Chacko.

Joshi gave ample indication that he saw no need to defer to the Chacko panel. The PAC, he said, was a perpetual body, whereas the JPC was just a temporary one. And, the PAC had started investigating the issue even before the JPC was formed.

Chacko had already said the PAC should confine its mandate to what the CAG had reported. Overlap with the JPC’s ambit was not desirable, he’d said. Asked about it, Joshi waved this away: “There can (legitimately) be several overlaps. There can be overlapping with JPC. There can be overlapping with the Supreme Court. There can be overlapping with the CBI probe.”

After all, he rubbed in, the PAC had a “constitutional mandate” and its powers went well beyond just a CAG report.

Rather unsurprisingly, Chacko has sought a meeting with the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Meira Kumar (who formally constituted the JPC, on an all-party resolution), to check if the PAC can go ahead with a parallel probe and to what extent. And, he wants Joshi to be present at the meeting. At the JPC’s first meeting on Thursday, Chacko presided over a discussion on how to proceed. It was decided to ask all JPC members to formally declare if they had any conflict of interest over the probe.