Mathura/Noida, Sep 26 (ANI) Stepping up pressure on the government, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Uma Bharti has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to dismiss Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram over his alleged role in the 2G scam.
Addressing a rally here on Sunday, Bharti urged the Prime Minister to accept Chidambaram's resignation at the earliest.
"I feel that Chidambaram must step down from his post and the Prime Minister should accept his resignation without further delay. It is not right to have a situation similar to the one that occurred with former Telecom Minister A. Raja, in which he had to resign but the delay caused in accepting it dented the Prime Minister's credibility," Bharti added.
Expressing concern at the extent of financial impropriety in central institutions, Bharti said that the government seemed to be facing an existential crisis.
"I feel that the very existence of the government has vanished. This is evident in the fact that the government departments indulged in colossal scams and yet remained undetected by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister himself acknowledged this in the parliament by saying that scams had indeed taken place in the ministries but he was unaware of them. This proves that the government is in disarray. That is why, I feel that the government should dissolve its existence by its own hands," added Bharti.
Meanwhile, lashing out at Chidambaram, senior BJP leader Rajnath Singh urged the Prime Minister and Congress President Sonia Gandhi to stop shielding Chidambaram.
"The Prime Minister should ask Chidambaram to relinquish his post, since it is clear in the note sent by the Finance Ministry that. Chidambaram was involved in the 2G spectrum case. So, the Prime Minister should not protect Chidambaram any longer. I also appeal to Sonia Gandhi to stop shielding Chidambaram," Singh told reporters in Noida.
Chidambaram came under fire after a 14-page note, prepared by a senior bureaucrat in the Finance Ministry and seen by Pranab Mukherjee, suggested that Chidambaram could have acted more stridently in 2008 on the spectrum pricing issue, when he was the country"s Finance Minister.
The note, which relied heavily on technicalities; says Chidambaram could have "stuck to the stand" of an auction of the highly valuable spectrum.
The note has come into the public domain under the Right to Information (RTI) Act petition filed by Vivek Garg, a prominent activist.
The telecom scam, one of India"s biggest graft cases ever, may have cost 39.57 billion dollars in revenue to the public exchequer as per the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). (ANI)
|
|
Comments:
