Illustration: Ashoke Mullick

Bouquets and brickbats are flying all around Murli Manohar Joshi, but the head of Parliament’s public accounts committee (PAC) looks blasé. The burst of attention and near-adulation heaped on him by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), after his recent confrontations with the Congress, appear to have had little effect on him. And neither does he seem bothered by the Congress salvos directed at him.

The 77-year-old head of the PAC — on his second term, renewed last week — has been in the eye of a raging storm. His report on the 2G spectrum scam — a corruption net that has caused the government considerable embarrassment — has been rejected by the Congress. On the other hand, his party, which often seeks to keep him out in the cold, suddenly seems to have discovered him.

“I do my work. What is being reported — this talk of my party finally rallying behind me — is far from the centre of truth,” he says. “The PAC was never discussed in our internal meetings,” he maintains poker-faced, before adding the punch line. “Yes, in the NDA (the BJP-led coalition) meetings, there were certain persons who thought my continuance in the PAC might adversely impact their demand for a joint parliamentary committee to examine the spectrum allocation scam. My answer was I have so many subjects to deal with. The PAC meetings were not always about 2G.”

As the chairman of the PAC, which conventionally superintends reports of the comptroller and auditor general, he probed the one on the 2G scam — and perhaps more microscopically than the other reports. “It was a matter of high concern because of the amounts involved,” he explains, flailing his hands.

In the process, sections of Delhi’s political establishment, including those from the BJP, felt that Joshi had “exceeded” his mandate as a super auditor at times by “straying” into the tricky policy-making terrain that was essentially the government’s business.

But he persisted.

The draft report he produced at the end of eight months was summarily rejected by a majority of panel members, while being hailed by the BJP. Questions are being raised whether a “minority” report will now be tabled in Parliament by the Lok Sabha Speaker to whom it was handed. The term of the committee that prepared it ended on April 30 and a new one has come into being. According to parliamentary rules, the new panel is free to take up the preceding committee’s report or do a fresh investigation or ignore 2G altogether.

Joshi appears to be undaunted. “My personal understanding is that it will be placed before the House,” he insists.

He is seated in the expansive drawing room of his government bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi — resplendent in a white dhoti and a raw silk kurta with a zari-bordered angawasthram wrapped around his neck. At home, he is a far cry from the difficult colleague that many in his party believe he is (he couldn’t, for instance, get along with the party’s regional satraps when he was the BJP president). Joshi is married to Tarla, a homemaker, and has two daughters. One of them, Nivedita, is a well-known practitioner of B.K.S. Iyengar’s yoga which cured her of a crippling slipped disc.

Joshi looks chuffed when he is reminded that he effortlessly secured a second term as the PAC chief but modestly insists the re-election was in accordance with convention and rules. “The chairman of the PAC is a Lok Sabha member from a recognised opposition. My party always had my name in mind,” he claims.

His relationship with his party, however, has had its share of problems. Often seen as a hardliner by the younger leaders, Joshi is also regarded as an oddity in the BJP. He is described as a loner who negotiates politics on his terms and yet who is “reasonably successful” as an organisational hand.

His proximity to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and specifically former supremo Rajendra Singh (they are both from Allahabad) helped him swing the post of the BJP president in 1991 at a time when the party was synonymous with Advani and his Ram rath yatra. And while north India was in the throes of a movement for backward caste empowerment, Brahmin Joshi chose to flaunt his high caste antecedents on the tuft of hair on his head and the red tikka on his forehead.

Joshi, indeed, has often created ripples in his party. The PAC re-election too was not as faithful to form as he would have one believe. There was a phase when, alarmed by his “pro-activism” — Joshi not only convened frequent meetings but also departed from norm to brief the press — the BJP brass felt it would be prudent to replace him with a pliant person. Sensing the contradictions, the Congress batted for Joshi when it thought he was under siege from within.

He won’t countenance the suggestion that politics dictated his panel’s working. “If anyone thought that by praising me or by offering to appear before the committee (Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had done both), I could be softened, it is a misjudgment of my character and politics,” Joshi insists.

“I did nothing out of turn. The 2G issue was an important plank in the BJP’s anti-corruption rallies,” he says. “I was one of those who placed the issue in a more forthright manner because I was privy to government records and evidence.”

Then wasn’t the Congress justified in saying he had used the PAC to foster the BJP’s larger politics on corruption? “It is a ridiculous charge. The report was drafted by the Lok Sabha secretariat, which is seasoned, and not by me. I give my approval when the draft comes before me,” he says.

But surely the political direction came from the top? “My job is to see if the facts in the report are contrary to the evidence or uncorroborated. Moreover, the PAC report is vetted by the CAG and the draft circulated among members. They go through it para by para, and can either support or contest the findings. Amendments can then be incorporated,” he replies.

But the point is that the 2G report was junked, I persist. “Everybody got a chance. If some members didn’t want to see the draft report, what can I do,” he says, alluding to the filibustering and obstructions that led to the report’s rejection. “They went on shouting at the last meeting when they should have discussed the report. I had an inkling they would do this but I never thought they would go to such an extent.”

Joshi shrugs off home minister P. Chidambaram’s pointed rebuttal of the PAC’s allegation that, as a former finance minister, he had proposed a closure of the 2G case to the Prime Minister. “He should read the CAG’s documents. He is in trouble and, therefore, orchestrated the drama by setting up his (Congress and DMK) members against me. He conducted the operation from the Congress office (in Parliament). That’s unacceptable.”

In his own party, Joshi has periodically been beset with crises that his rivals have exploited to their advantage. He was cornered in September 2003 when he offered to resign as the human resource development minister in anticipation of a chargesheet in the Babri Masjid demolition case.

“I had no right to continue in office as a minister who was framed. All my life I have been talking of principles so how could I have not quit after the chargesheet,” he asks.

There was a perception then that he spoke out prematurely because he wanted to force L.K. Advani’s hand too. Advani was the deputy Prime Minister. There is no straight answer from Joshi. “Atalji (Atal Bihari Vajpayee) was out of the country. My resignation reached him when he was on the aircraft. From there he phoned and asked, ‘Aap ne yeh kya kiya?’ (What have you done?). I stuck to my stand,” he says.

The chargesheet named Joshi and some others, but left out Advani’s name in the conspiracy case. “I was surprised,” Joshi recollects. “I congratulated Advani and said it was a good thing because at least he had opened the door for the others. ‘We can hope to be let off because if there is no evidence against you, there should be no evidence against the others too,’ I said.”

In an ironical twist, Vajpayee, supposed to be his sympathiser, sat on Joshi’s resignation and turned it down after the Allahabad High Court stayed the framing of charges.

Once an inextricable part of the BJP’s pantheon of triumvirates that included Vajpayee and Advani, does Joshi feel marginalised these days?

“Vajpayeeji is not in action but Advani and I are. It is artificial to club us together. I am 10 years younger than Vajpayeeji and seven years younger than Advani,” he protests, with a laugh.

Joshi, like Vajpayee and Advani, has had a long innings. He was 10 when he joined the RSS, and went on to become a founder general secretary of the BJP. He fought — and won — his first Lok Sabha election from Almora after being released from jail during the Emergency.

He, however, claims he has no issue with the leadership baton passing into the BJP’s “young” hands. The former physics professor from Allahabad University says, “I encouraged my students to come up. Some of them became professors in other colleges before me.”

If that is a source of solace for someone who might have aspired to be in Vajpayee’s shoes, there is another explanation that is a politician’s shibboleth. “I do not need a position. I have an independent identity and that is as Murli Manohar Joshi.”

Is that the assertion of a has-been? There are no full stops in politics.