Govt, Oppn fight it out in Parl over 'cash-for-votes' scam

New Delhi, Mar 23 (PTI) Indian Government and the
Opposition Wednesday fought a bitter battle in Parliament over
the 'cash- for-votes' scam with Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP)
being accused of engineering an operation to destabilise
United Progressive Alliance-I in 2008 while Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh hit back at political parties placing reliance
on unverified diplomatic communications.
The face-off between the two sides came during a
day-long debate raked up by the Opposition on the basis of US
diplomatic correspondence in the run-up to the 2008 Confidence
Vote as contained by the Wikileaks, first accessed by The
Hindu.
The highlight of the debate, that often turned
acrimonious, was an attempt by two senior ministers to turn
the tables on the Opposition, mainly BJP, accusing it of
having carried out a sting operation in July 2008 to
destabilise the Congress-led government.
They relied on "revelations" contained in the latest
issue of a news portal, which they claimed exposed the BJP's
"game-plan".
Singh adopted a combative approach to the Opposition
attack and demands for his resignation in the wake of renewed
charges that MPs were purchased to save the UPA-I government.
In an uncharacteristic manner, Singh targeted L K
Advani for raking up the issue, saying the BJP leader thought
becoming Prime Minister was his "birth right" and hence had
never "forgiven me".
He asked Advani to wait for three-and-a-half years, in
an apparent reference to the next Lok Sabha polls.
Singh insisted that nobody from Congress or government
was involved or had "authorised" anybody to engage in
"transactions" like purchase of MPs during the trust vote and
raised questions over the authenticity of the correspondence
between the US Embassy here and its government in Washington.
Questioning the reliance of political parties on the
diplomatic cables, Singh said if a diplomat wants to pit two
major political parties against each other, he only needed to
write a report and plant it in the media.
While Home Minister P Chidambaram did not name the
party or the portal in Rajya Sabha, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal
took names to attack the BJP.
Promising that the Delhi Police investigation into the
'cash-for-votes' scam would be completed soon, Chidambaram
said the charge that a political party had "engineered and
manufactured" the sting operation would also be probed.
He said revelations have come that the sting operation
by a TV channel was not an independent journalistic work but a
"deliberate attempt in collaboration with a political party".

In the Lower House of Parliament, Lok Sabha, Sibal
said the sting operation was a testimony to the contemporary
discourse in which the BJP "entrapped" MPs, the Samajwadi
Party "voluntarily fell into the trap" and a TV channel played
along.
A united Opposition attacked the Prime Minister,
asking how he could wash his hands of the 'cash-for-votes'
scam and questioning why he continued to remain in the post if
he was unaware of developments involving his government.
Slamming Singh for arguing that 2009 Lok Sabha poll
win proved nothing wrong had happened during the Confidence
Motion, the Opposition parties, including BJP and Left, said
electoral victory cannot condone the criminality of the matter
which had "shamed" Indian democracy.
To bring out the truth, they demanded a probe by CBI
into the charges of such a magnitude, asking why the
investigation was handed over to Delhi Police in the first
place and not the "appropriate agency" as recommended by the
Parliament's Inquiry Committee.