The national scrutiny under which the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General on the issue of 2G spectrum allocation by the first UPA government has been placed by a unique turn of events in the past two days is quite extraordinary.
If the basic premise that went into preparing that explosive report, as now revealed by a retired top official of the national audit office, can be shown to be not fundamentally flawed (even if some factual or technical details are faulty), then we are in deep trouble as a country. At the very least, we could be running into a constitutional crisis of an unprecedented nature, for something as ghastly as secret collaboration between the CAG and the BJP, the principal Opposition party, has been hinted at by the former official.
The CAG’s audit report on the grant of 2G spectrum in late 2010 had stunned and mortified the country by suggesting a “presumptive” loss to the national exchequer of `1.76 lakh crore. In popular discourse, which the CAG did little to discount, this was treated as a real loss. It was rightly supposed that at the root of this was corruption of unimaginable proportions at the highest levels. This set in train events whose echoes are yet to die down.
A Cabinet minister, A. Raja, was sacked and then jailed, along with Kanimozhi, an MP and daughter of DMK patriarch K. Karunanidhi. Relations between the Congress and the DMK within the ruling UPA-2 alliance were disturbed and are yet to heal fully. The Supreme Court stepped in with caustic interventions that titillated the country on a daily basis. A concerted effort was made to frame P. Chidambaram, finance minister when the 2G spectrum was allotted, in what came to be known as the 2G scam, causing a ruckus within the Congress Party. The media reviled the government day after day with the spectacular figure touted by the CAG. Opposition parties left no stone unturned to drill into the public mind that no government in the country had been as steeped in corruption as the present one. But we are now bombarded with fresh information purported to make us believe that the CAG was in cahoots with the BJP through Murli Manohar Joshi, the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament.
The sorry episode needs to be thoroughly investigated by a high-level committee chaired by a retired Chief Justice of India (to cut out political colouring), and the report submitted to Parliament expeditiously as the PAC is involved.