A vote too many
For weeks it had been clear that the Public Accounts Committee was headed for a fracas — especially after Congress and DMK members took up their party line that once a joint parliamentary committee on telecom had been constituted, the PAC should desist from inquiring into 2G spectrum allocation. The argument was, and remains, flimsy. Yet, no one could have expected the meeting called to take a final view on the draft to collapse so fast into such unprecedented mayhem. After UPA MPs tried to force a vote, a move resisted by opposition MPs, PAC chairman M.M. Joshi adjourned the meet. But the UPA MPs — who with support from a BSP and an SP MP, held a 11-10 majority on the committee — stayed on and elected themselves a new chairman, Saifuddin Soz, and rejected the report. This is a tactic of such breathtaking recklessness that the UPA should consider what it implies for the committee system in Parliament and for the immediate need to bring a working civility to Parliament.
The PAC is a committee of long lineage, and after Independence it has been incrementally strengthened as a watchdog on the government’s finances. Early on ministers were kept out of the committee, and by the mid-1960s a convention was adopted of appointing an opposition MP as chairperson. It is a convention that’s mostly worked well, and it has served as a mechanism to nurture working relations between government and opposition so critical in a parliamentary democracy. This is why the UPA’s ploy of forcing a vote is so reckless — it threatens to wreck the consultative and give-and-take mechanisms between treasury and opposition benches that steel the legislature into the sum of more than the ruling party/ coalition’s numbers. Certainly, the current stand-off draws from the politically charged 2G context. And Joshi, as committee chair, could have done more to prepare the members for a more deliberative paragraph-by-paragraph reading of the draft, especially the contentious portions relating to the prime minister. He should have seen the polarised my-truth-versus-yours political environment and refrained from making his press conferences such a performance.
Insecure state
IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt of the Gujarat cadre filed an explosive affidavit with the Supreme Court, accusing Chief Minister Narendra Modi of deliberate inacti-on after the Godhra train burning in 2002 — even as communal riots tore the state apart. He also claimed that the SC-appointed special investigation team (SIT) had been reluctant to record testimony of those prepared to indict Modi, and were actively fudging facts and coercing witnesses. That’s a serious claim, and Bhatt better be fully prepared to back it up. However, if true, it would be devastating confirmation that the CM was intentionally, vengefully derelict in his duties, and that later, the state’s police and administration were under instruction to deny justice to Gujarat’s Muslims.
Whatever the truth-value of that claim, now that it has been made public, Bhatt has invited grave danger upon himself, in a state as polarised as Gujarat. However, the government has now withdrawn his security cover — one that he had to put together himself, with four men from the training college where he is principal. This, despite the explicit requirement that those deposing before the investigators should be given full protection.
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