An ‘orphan' Government

Last Sunday, the Union Law Minister, Mr Salman Khurshid, attempted to defuse the tension regarding the Finance Ministry office memorandum (note) dated March 25, 2011, filed in the Supreme Court on September 21 by Mr Subramanian Swamy, by describing it as an “orphan inference”, thereby reducing the note in question to a level of importance which leaves people wondering why it should have been written at all.

Is this the way the UPA Government treats “troublesome” communication between the Finance Ministry and the Prime Minister's Office? Alternatively, if it is argued that the note was certainly not an unimportant one, what sort of a dispensation is it by the Government that communication of this sort is prepared, as Mr Khurshid reportedly said on September 26, “by an official at the lower level”.

POINT TO BE NOTED

The media, of course, has been made a scapegoat, as it always is, whenever the powers that be — be it the Government or any other agency in a similar situation — find themselves in a tricky situation, because of some report or the other. Thus, the Law Minister has said that the media was paying “unnecessary attention” to the note which, as Mr Khurshid is reported to have said, had “no meaning”.

This, of course, is the Minister's own inference, which, he will readily agree, needn't be accepted by his audience. The important point here is that no part of the note has been challenged as being untrue and, secondly (as the Union Finance Minister has asserted in a letter to the Prime Minister), it wasn't the unilateral brainchild of his Ministry but was prepared against “the backdrop of demands from the Public Accounts Committee to summon the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary for explaining the role of the PMO in spectrum allocation”.

The other critical point in the evolving story — which even presented before the nation the ludicrous scene of the Union Finance and Home Ministers appearing in public together under the tutelage of Ms Sonia Gandhi, to convey the impression that there was nothing wrong between them — is that the note in question, which had been “seen” by Mr Pranab Mukherjee, had insinuated “that some decisive interventions” by the then Finance Minister, Mr Chidambaram, “could have averted the 2G scandal”.

TAKING CHARGE

Since the storm of the controversy broke, the present Finance minister has tried to project the view that the note includes “certain inferences and interpretations which do not reflect my views”. One would have thought that Mr Mukherjee would have noted this point on the office memorandum itself, which would have spared him a lot of trouble subsequently. Quite clearly, the “note ball” has just begun to roll, and no amount of whitewashing by the Government and the Congress Party will be able to stop it if the Supreme Court decides to delve deeper into the issue. The indications are not propitious for those who want to smooth out the existing differences between senior Ministers in Dr Singh's Cabinet — just “working differences”, as Mr Khurshid would have the nation believe.

All this apart, since Monday, a new Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, who is said to be well-known to the mainsprings of power within the Congress party, has taken charge. Straws in the wind gently hint that the note affair was timed to take place before the change took place in the PMO. Come to think of it, who would be interested in doing this?

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