Senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha has expressed ‘surprise’ and ‘disappointment’ over the Prime Minister’s response on appearing before Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) investigating the 2G scam.

In a letter written to the Prime Minister, Sinha said, “Of course, it is for JPC to decide whether you appear as a witness or not, but the same principle is applied to PAC (Public Account Committee) when you made a grand offer publicly to appear before it.”

On April 3, the Prime Minister virtually rejected Sinha’s demand for his appearance before JPC on 2G, saying the panel should take a call on it even as he asserted that he had nothing to hide. He had responded by saying that all “pertinent” documents related to 2G spectrum allocation of 2008 were available with the JPC.

“The decision as to what evidence should be sought and which individuals should be asked to appear before the JPC is a matter that needs to be decided internally by the JPC and its Chairman,” the Prime Minister had said in his letter to Sinha.

Reacting to the Prime Minister’s response, Sinha said that if the JPC was to come to conclusions only on the basis of records and documents then clearly it had wasted its time by calling so many witnesses to dispose before it. Sinha found it difficult to agree with the Prime Minister’s claim that neither he nor his Government had anything to hide in this matter.

“If it was so, then a number of crucial documents could not have been held back from the JPC as the Government did. These documents had to be literally ferreted out of the Government by the JPC when the media brought them into public domain,” Sinha alleged.

shishir.Sinha@thehindu.co.in

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