DMK readies dissenting note to draft JPC report

Chennai, April 22 (IANS) DMK members of the joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probing the allocation and pricing of 2G spectrum have readied their dissent note to the panel’s draft report, said the party’s parliamentary leader T.R. Baalu.

He said the party would also demand the removal of P.C. Chacko as the JPC’s chairman.

“We have prepared a dissent note. Even though it is only a draft JPC report, we have readied our dissent note to it,” Baalu told IANS over phone.

According to him, everything would be clear at the April 25 meeting of the JPC.

“Our demand is that A. Raja (former telecom minister) should be allowed to depose before the JPC. We are confining our demand to our own issue,” he said.

The truth has to come out and for that Raja should be heard at the JPC, Baalu reiterated, while declining to comment on the points on which DMK members of the JPC would be dissenting.

Baalu did not agree with Chacko’s reasoning that the telecom ministers during the period under review – 1998-2009 – would have to be called for deposition if Raja was called.

The JPC has two DMK members – Baalu and Trichi Siva.

The draft report of the JPC, circulated among the members last week, has blamed DMK’s Raja for the spectrum allocation while clearing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram.

Reacting to that, DMK president M. Karunanidhi had wondered how one could believe that a prime minister could be misled by his minister. Speaking to reporters here, Karunanidhi had asked: “How could it be believed that a minister misled the prime minister?”

On his part, Raja asserted that he took all the decisions in consultation with the prime minister.

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