The Samajwadi Party and BSP swung the number game in favour of the ruling coalition in the PAC meeting on Thursday on the back of a top Congress leader clinching their support in his parleys with the leadership of the two parties late evening on Wednesday.
Sources revealed that the parliamentary affairs minister P.K. Bansal met the SP member in the PAC Kunwar Revati Raman Singh late evening on Wednesday after he had called up the SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav.
In the similar way, the sources said the BSP member in the PAC, Mr Baliram, was also roped in to support the ruling coalition in the crucial meting of the PAC on Thursday, which rejected the draft report after the chairman Murli Manohar Joshi walked out before adjourning the meeting.
However, speaking to this newspaper the SP member in the PAC Kunwar Revati Raman Singh defended his support to the ruling coalition by saying that the members had little time to study the draft report. But he disapproved the Congress-DMK move to elect the new chairman of the PAC.
Though calling the event of the day in the PAC meeting “unfortunate”, Mr Singh stated that the draft report was too long and the annextures were provided to the members on Thursday morning only there was little time to study. “It would have been better if the meeting was postponed and even if the term of the PAC was to expire the next committee could have taken up the draft report,” added Mr Singh.
In a criticism of Dr Joshi, Mr Singh even charged that the pages from 206 to 270 of the draft report were prepared much earlier.