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Whose Loss Is It Anyway?

Senior UPA leaders who had dismissed the CAG report as presumptive are now left red-faced

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Whose Loss Is It Anyway?
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With the arrest of A. Raja, will the allegations of “notional loss” in the 2G scam finally end? Remember senior ministers of the UPA government being critical of the CAG for concluding in its report that the “presumptive” loss of revenue in the scam was Rs 1.76 lakh crore? In pushing this line, they were trying to water down the extent of the 2G scam and even defending Raja.

Who can forget Raja’s successor in the telecom ministry, Kapil Sibal, tearing into the CAG report at a widely-publicised press conference? “We believe the exercise by the CAG was fraught with very serious errors which resulted in a kind of sensationalism which has allowed the Opposition to spread utter falsehood to the people of India,” Sibal had thundered, earning himself a strong rebuke from the Supreme Court. He even went so far as to pronounce that there was “no loss of revenue”.

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Now that Raja has been arrested and the CAG report has been vindicated, there are many red faces in the government. Soon after Sibal trashed the report, igniting a controversy, Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia chose to indulge in a bit of sophistry but ended up singeing his fingers when he declared in a TV interview that any estimation of the loss to the exchequer was “not very fruitful” because the government telecom policy has never been one about “trying to raise revenue”.

He even went on to defend the firms (Swan and Unitech) which had bought spectrum cheap and sold it to overseas players for whopping profits. “The public is being misled quite a bit on this. It’s true that Swan and Unitech issued new equity to the companies that bought into them because they had telecom spectrum allocation. (But) this money didn’t go to the promoters, it went into the new companies and is meant to be used to roll out the telecom services,” said Montek.

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Even Union law minister M. Veerappa Moily, who perhaps should have known better, stuck his neck out to defend Raja. He argued that the damning CAG report was “not an indictment” of the minister. The PM too attracted criticism in November last year when in an avuncular gesture he patted the tainted Raja on his back at a function at the dmk’s office in Parliament. This at a time when the 2G controversy was raging. Things might have changed now, but the DMK has chosen to stand by its man even now, arguing that he is not guilty just because he has been put behind bars!

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