Friday, December 3, 2010

BJP, please also look inside!

As the main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party may be feeling justified in not letting Parliament function for the last three weeks over the opposition's demand for setting up a Joint Parliamentary Committee to inquire into the 2G spectrum and Commonwealth Games scams, but it has also to look at its own conduct. And here I am not referring to the admission of nepotism and other wrongdoings made by its chief minister of Karnataka, B.S. Yeddyurappa, whom, after an initial show of toughness, the party allowed to continue as chief minister.

Niira Radia of the Radia tapes was photographed with Atal Behari Bajpai at the Pejawar Peeth in 2003 when Bajpai was very much the prime minister, the Pejawar Swami and two other priest-looking persons were the only other people in the photograph. This Lankesh Patrike photograph has been reproduced in the latest issue of the Outlook magazine. Will the BJP ever explain the obvious proximity Radia, a known lobbyist even then, had with the prime minister? Or for that matter, will they care to clarify about her reported closeness with Ananth Kumar even earlier, in 1998-99, when he was Civil Aviation minister in the NDA government and she a lobbyist of the Singapore Airlines?

For the ministers' corruption and conduct not befitting their important public positions, it is the role of the opposition to haul the government over burning coals but while doing so it should not forget its own behaviour when it was in power.

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