New Delhi: The BJP on Thursday cited a Supreme Court verdict on 2G spectrum to assert corruption in the case and claimed that a trial court order acquitting the accused was no “clean chit” to the Opposition party.
While finance minister Arun Jaitley cited the details of the UPA government’s policy and the apex court’s subsequent order in 2012 quashing all allocations to say that facts proved corruption in the case, his colleague Prakash Javadekar claimed it was the Congress which had “choreographed” the chargesheet in the criminal matter.
The trial court in its verdict on Thursday described the chargesheet as “choreographed”.
Mr Javadekar told reporters that the CBI had filed it in 2011 when the Congress-led UPA was in power.
“The Congress choreographed it,” he said, citing a case in which then law minister Ashwani Kumar had to resign after he was accused of interfering with a CBI report into a probe in coal block allocations.
Mr Javadekar likened the case to a murder probe, saying that if somebody was killed, the guilty had to be exposed.
Similarly, he said, corruption had taken place and the guilty had to be found.
Citing the Supreme Court verdict in 2012 quashing all allocations, Jaitley said the fact that the UPA’s policy was dishonest and intended to promote corruption had been upheld by the apex court. Each allocation was quashed as arbitrary and unfair, he said, adding that the criminal case was launched on the Supreme Court’s order.
Mr Jaitley also rejected former telecom minister Kapil Sibal’s “zero loss” claim in the allocation, saying it was disproved by the subsequent allocation by the BJP-led NDA government, fetching '1.10 lakh crore in 2015 and '66,000 crore in 2016. Sibal fired a fresh salvo at the BJP following the trial court order on Thursday.
