By IANS,
New Delhi : The opposition has no “objective grounds or factual basis” to boycott Home Minister P. Chidambaram in parliament over his alleged links to the 2G spectrum corruption scandal, Law Minister Salman Khurshid said Tuesday.
“I don’t know (why they are boycotting Chidambaram). I am asking them (opposition) and they are not able to explain what the reason is,” Khurshid told reporters here. Chidambaram laid the written answer to the first question put to him on the first day of the winter session Tuesday and as the house plunged into noisy scenes Speaker Meira Kumar adjourned the sitting.
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) Monday decided to boycott Chidambaram for his alleged role in the 2G scam. It wanted his role in allocation of spectrum probed as he was finance minister in 2008. Former telecom minister A.Raja, his DMK party colleague Kanimozhi and several others are in jail for their links to the scam.
Khurshid said: “I don’t think they have objective grounds to do it or any factual basis. Even if we give them benefit of doubt that they want to interpret a particular document or any event in a manner that favours their point of view, I think it’s a little bit remote and involves a lot of imagination.”
He was referring to a March 25 note to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) from the finance ministry headed by Pranab Mukherjee that said the airwaves could have been auctioned in 2008 if Chidambaram, who was then finance minister, had “stuck to his stand”.
The law minister said there are “many bills which are of high value and importance in which there is adequate consensus available but there may be others on which some more work needs to be done.”
“But that’s all to be seen in the backdrop that we are going to pass any legislation. First, we must be able to pass some legislation that is important,” he added.