That’s our money you’re wasting…
Ever since the winter session of Parliament began on 9 November, it has failed to function even for a single day beyond question hour. As soon as the houses convene, members from the opposition parties come down to the well of the house and shout slogans demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) inquiry into the 2G scam. Question Hour is usually held amid this chaos, when almost nothing can be heard. As soon as it is over, the din increases exponentially till the presiding officers adjourn the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha for the next day.
The government, it appears, is willing to settle for any kind of inquiry – even one directly supervised by the Supreme Court – but not for a JPC. The opposition insists that any probe short of a JPC cannot be trusted.
Why not a JPC? Says the government, the opposition is insisting on a JPC only to summon the Prime Minister and ministers, and unnecessarily embarrass them. It has, instead, offered an inquiry by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC), assisted by the investigative agencies. The present PAC is headed by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Murli Manohar Joshi.
In fact, the issue of the 2G scam is already before the PAC since July. Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai has appeared before the panel as a witness. The final CAG report on 2G mobile bandwidth allocation has been circulated among members, and the PAC has sought details of the correspondence between the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the Telecom Ministry on the subject.
Notwithstanding this, the Opposition says it wants a JPC. It has argued that the PAC does not have powers to summon senior ministers, which the JPC does. Several rounds of formal and informal negotiations have failed, including an all-party meeting convened by master-negotiator Pranab Mukherjee. What we have is a classic impasse.
The Opposition is determined not to allow Parliament to function. But the government refuses to curtail the winter session, as some of its advisors have recommended. It insists that Parliament will continue for the scheduled length of the winter session, till 13 December. Are we going have this daily chaos for another three weeks? First, the opposition wanted Telecom Minister A Raja to resign. Even though he was not a Congress MP and the UPA is a coalition government, the Congress brought heavy pressure on the DMK, and he finally put in his papers. The CAG, the CBI and the PAC are all probing the scam. The matter has been placed before the Supreme Court in a petition filed by the tenacious Subramaniam Swamy.
Still, the opposition is refusing to budge on anything less than a JPC. But faced with a similar slew of scams involving the Chief Minister of its first state government in South India, B S Yeddyurappa, the BJP has announced that he will continue in office despite numerous charges of illicit land deals by his children and other relatives…
This is double standards, and no landslide in Bihar – however massive – can cover up this fact.
Each minute that each MP wastes in the Houses of Parliament has been estimated to cost the public exchequer Rs26,000. The expenditure for each day of a session wasted is estimated at Rs7.8 crore. So, the 10 successive days of adjournment of Parliament translate into a staggering loss of Rs78 crore! That’s our money.
From the poorest pavement dweller to the filthy rich, the public pays for Parliament. Most of the money, in fact, comes from not from the rich but from the poor ‘aam admi’, in taxes on everything (s)he buys. Do these MPs have a right to waste it just like that?
