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What happened in the secret meeting between social activist Anna Hazare and the then foreign minister Salman Khurshid will be revealed for the first time on the pages of The Other Side of the Mountain.
A memoir of the then foreign minister on the five years of the United Progressive Alliance’s second term (UPA-II), the book is likely to ruffle a few feathers, said sources.
The memoir will provide the Congress-led government’s version and defence of what became a litany of scams — 2G; Coalgate — that rocked the United Progressive Alliance.
It will also reveal the “real” version of what transpired in the secret meeting between Hazare and Khurshid in 2012, leading to the split in Team Anna.
Arvind Kejriwal, an aide of Hazare then who later became the chief minister of Delhi for a short while, had blamed Khurshid of trying to drive a wedge between the members of the team.
Sources said Khurshid says in the book that during the hush-hush meeting with Hazare on the contentious Lokpal bill, the anti-corruption activist had requested it to be kept a secret.
The former minister also says Anna Hazare told him it was okay to lie in the national interest and so he had denied it in the media.
Hazare, too, did not tell anyone on his team about the meeting, instead telling them that he was going to meet a saint.
The news was leaked when a letter from the Prime Minister’s Office to Hazare got delivered to Kejriwal, who was livid to find out that he had been kept in the dark.
The scams that haunted the United Progressive Alliance in its second term in office have been the subject of a number of books already. Khurshid’s memoir will throw a light on how the government perceived the developments.
“In a criminal case, we can try someone for murder, but here even though no one has said ‘A’ has disappeared or ‘B’ has disappeared, we are putting people on trial,” Khurshid told reporters indicating that in his view the controversy over the 2G spectrum allocation and the coal block allocations was much ado about nothing.
He also said the judges of the Supreme Court, in their advisory capacity, said what the government of the day had done was no wrong in the 2G case.
Justifying the government’s stand of not opting for the auction route and recalling how former Union minister Kapil Sibal had said there was “zero loss” in the 2G case, Khurshid said the Planning Commission, in a paper, had pitched for an affordable price to ensure the maximum mobile connections in the country.
Besides, Khurshid said in the allocation of spectrum, no company was deprived and all got licence.
