The Weakest Link

All the party can do is put up a brave front. This is not the first time that Joshi has played the maverick

Just when the Bharatiya Janata Party was beginning to think that it had tied down the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) over the 2G scam, it reminded us of an old proverb: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. After forcing Parliament to conduct nearly no business during the winter session, the BJP has run into its weakest link: former Human Resources Development Minister Dr Murli Manohar Joshi. Since the winter session began (and ended, fruitlessly) the party has held that it will not climb down from its demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe of what it calls ‘the biggest scam in independent India’. But Joshi has once again decided to chart his own course on the matter.

All that the party can now do is put up a brave front, because this is not the first time that Joshi has played the maverick. He did not hide his displeasure when the party chose LK Advani as its PM candidate for the 2009 Lok Sabha election. Then, once the results came in, he offered himself for the position of Leader of Opposition, much to the discomfort of relatively younger leaders waiting to take charge. What has now embarrassed the party is that Joshi’s position is what the ruling Congress wants—that a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is competent enough to probe the scam. On 28 December, as the battle of words between the Congress and BJP was still on, Joshi chaired a meeting of the PAC to look into Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s offer to appear before the committee. He even held a press conference to say that the PAC can expand its scope and go beyond just examining the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). The opposition’s stand has been just the opposite. Legally, the PAC cannot summon any ministers, let alone the PM. And if the PM’s offer to appear before the PAC has been a ploy to create confusion, Joshi’s antics have only added to it.

Joshi’s party colleague Sushma Swaraj sought to clarify the party’s stand through her tweets: ‘The scope of PAC is totally different from that of JPC. While PAC deals with accounts, JPC deals with accountability and governance.’ The party, forced on the backfoot, issued a statement through  spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy a day after Joshi’s press conference: “The BJP at its highest level reiterates its stand that to go deep into the Rs 1.76 lakh crore scam, nothing less than a JPC probe will do. We want to state categorically that the BJP will not accept anything less than a JPC.”

About The Author

Jatin Gandhi

Jatin Gandhi has covered politics and policy for over a decade now for print, TV and the web. He is Deputy Political Editor at Open.