New Delhi, Nov 1 (IANS) Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee Tuesday met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi following revelations that his ministry’s Match note on 2G spectrum allocation, which sparked of a controversy, was actually written at the behest of the prime minister’s office (PMO).
Official sources said that the meetings were ‘prescheduled’. However, there was no information about what transpired in the meetings.
The Congress, meanwhile, said there was no controversy surrounding Sep 26 letter by Mukherjee which said that the March note was drafted after detailed discussions with the PMO and the cabinet secretariat.
Mukherjee had indeed clarified that the note was actually written at the behest of the PMO, senior government officials confirmed Tuesday.
Senior officials in North Block said Mukherjee had informed Manmohan Singh in New York in September that he would look into the matter when he returns to India and followed that up with a formal letter.
‘The finance minister had put on record that the note was sent since some official from the Prime Minister’s Office kept insisting for it,’ a senior official in the Finance Ministry told IANS, requesting anonymity.
The letter also pointed out that the entire exercise of preparing and sending a formal note on 2G note was initiated by the cabinet secretary in January 2011 and the finance ministry’s point of view was formalised by the Department of Economic Affairs.
‘The prime minister was also told that neither he (finance minister) nor his ministry had dispatched the note on their own,’ the official said, adding: ‘The finance minister wrote the letter soon after he met the prime minister in New York.’
This apart, the finance minister also said his ministry was not in favour of dispatching a formal letter, but relented only after ‘persistent’ calls by a joint secretary in the PMO.
Meanwhile, Congress spokesman Manish Tewari said circumstances surrounding the note ‘have been discussed to death’.
‘We must keep in mind that the note is reiteration of what happened between December 2003 and February 2011…If at all there is any concern with regard to interpretation and sequence of the matter in the letter, then the judgement should be left to the JPC (Joint Parliamentary Committee), which has a mandate to look into the entire gamut of the spectrum allocation from 1998 to 2009,’ he said.
The note in March, sent to the PMO, had suggested that spectrum, a scarce resource, could have been auctioned instead of being allocated had it been insisted upon by Home Minister P. Chidambaram, who was holding the finance portfolio then.
The note, which came into the public domain by way of a plea under the Right to Information Act, triggered a political storm and Chidambaram came under attack. The opposition even asked him to quit, which also led to some friction between him and Mukherjee, leading Mukherjee to clarify that interpretation in document did not reflect his views.
A hurt Chidambaram had also reportedly offered to resign.
But at the behest of Gandhi and the prime minister, both Mukherjee and Chidambaram said the matter had been settled.
