BJP-Shourie feud comes to the fore

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Countering its senior leader Arun Shourie’s claim that he had asked Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj and her Rajya Sabha counterpart Arun Jaitley to raise the 2G spectrum allocation issue but they did not, the BJP on Monday released excerpts of Mr Jaitley’s July 2009 Parliament speech on the issue.
Mr Shourie, in an interview to a news channel recently, had stated that though he had requested Ms Swaraj and Mr Jaitley to raise the issue in Parliament in 2009, the two did not raise it.
Speaking on the issue, BJP national spokesperson, Prakash Javadekar said: “BJP has taken up the 2G spectrum allocation issue from day one. Arun Shourie has himself raised this issue in Parliament till he was a member (of the Rajya Sabha). He was expressing the BJP view (in Parliament).”
The excerpts of Mr Jaitley’s speech in Rajya Sabha on July 23, 2009 shows that the senior leader had raised the issue where he had said “there is no reason why the guilty in this case are not investigated and prosecuted for having conferred a huge pecuniary advantage on private persons while causing wrongful loss to the government of India through this criminal misconduct.”
The senior leaders had also said: “In 2007, an open licence regime was recommended. Pursuant to this, the government of India invited applications for telecom licences setting October 1, 2007 as the deadline. Later, the government created an artificial date viz September 25, 2007 as the cut-off date. For some curious reasons, applications received between September 26, 2007 and October 1, 2007 were not considered.”
Mr Shourie has also been asked by the CBI to appear before it on February 21 on the 2G spectrum issue.