Murli Manohar Joshi

New Delhi, Jan. 5: Murli Manohar Joshi has told the BJP he will “go slow” on the probe into the 2G spectrum scam after the RSS signalled its displeasure with his “pro-activism” as the public accounts committee chairman.

Joshi told the party he was unlikely to take up the spectrum issue in the next few meetings of the panel. This month’s meetings will discuss defence and non-conventional energy. The schedule so far does not mention telecom, which covers 2G spectrum, as a subject of discussion.

After he was nominated to chair the PAC — one of the three parliamentary financial committees that acts as a watchdog on government spending — Joshi started examining the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General on the spectrum issue with such enthusiasm and diligence that made the BJP sit up and wonder whether there was a political subtext to his moves.

Many in the BJP felt he was defanging the Opposition’s campaign for a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) from an unyielding government. The government used Joshi’s conduct to needle the BJP by suggesting when its senior MP was already inquiring, why did it insist on a parallel mechanism?

Joshi conceded in a recent interview: “What they (his BJP colleagues) say is that your continuance in PAC is confusing the issue — it is as if you are opposing a PAC.”

Instead of ticking him off directly, the RSS marshalled BJP president Nitin Gadkari’s help. Last week, Gadkari summoned the veteran and asked him to “clarify” his stand on the JPC-PAC “rivalry”. BJP sources said Joshi took the “message” more seriously than he ordinarily would have. “He figured out that Gadkari was Nagpur’s messenger and he could not trifle with the RSS,” a source said.

He issued a statement saying that a JPC alone was empowered to comprehensively vet the scam while the PAC’s role concerned “matters of public spending based on CAG reports”. This was the line the BJP had articulated from the start of the controversy. Joshi disregarded it and had told his confidants that his panel could also enlarge its ambit to do what a JPC could.

Joshi, RSS sources maintained, used his PAC status to show L.K. Advani “his place” because the JPC demand was spearheaded by Advani and his loyalists. Despite the issues it had with Advani, the RSS did not take kindly to Joshi allegedly using a constitutional post to play internal politics.