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New Delhi, Sept. 12: The BJP today urged President Pranab Mukherjee to thwart the Congress’s “dangerous” attack on the comptroller and auditor general and on the “entire constitutional mechanism designed by our founding fathers to ensure accountability and transparency”.
A delegation comprising L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Opposition leaders Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj handed over a petition against the Congress when the party made its first political call on Mukherjee since he assumed charge at Rashtrapati Bhavan.
The Congress has questioned the credibility of the public accounts committee as well as the CAG — the former, when it presented its report on the 2G spectrum allocation, and the CAG on the 2G and the coal block allocations.
In their memorandum the BJP picked not so much on the Congress as the Prime Minister. “What is most shocking are the statements of the Prime Minister in Parliament and public on August 27,” the memorandum said, quoting Manmohan Singh’s comment about the CAG’s observations being “clearly disputable”.
The BJP alleged that by “issuing such a statement”, the Prime Minister was, “in fact, converting a bipartisan discussion in the PAC into a highly polarised debate” and inferred that it would make the panel “totally dysfunctional”.
Mukherjee reportedly told the team he would “look into” their complaints.
The Congress accused the BJP of “hypocrisy”. “The BJP should recall its behaviour when it was in the government,” spokesperson Rashid Alvi said, recalling that Arun Shourie had rubbished the CAG’s methodology of computing losses as “idiotic” when the disinvestment ministry he headed was faulted for the sale of Mumbai’s Centaur Hotel.
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