Taking exception to what he called UPA Government attributing mala fide intention to the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG) adverse finding against the Government in the coal bloc allocation, Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chairman and BJP senior leader Dr Murali Manohar Joshi said on Friday that the government was not interested in bringing out the irregularities.
Addressing a ‘Meet the Press’ programme at the Press Club here, he said that the government was denigrating the Constitutional authority by making ‘preposterous statement’.
It was the Constitutional duty of the CAG to find out whether the government had lost the money or not in the coal bloc allocation. He said that democracy cannot function without accountability.
“The government is trying to shield the guilty. To dictate to the CAG is unethical. Attributing political motives to an objective report is denigrating the Constitutional institution,” he said.
He said under no circumstance the CAG report should be discussed in Parliament as there had been no such precedence. The practice is to place the report to the Ministry concerned and ask them to explain if there was any irregularity in the accounts. If the explanation is satisfactory, the CAG would remove the adverse remarks. If the explanation did not satisfy the CAG, it would give a draft report through the President of India or PAC. After being examined, it would give the government another chance to explain its position. And only after this process that the report is placed before Parliament.
Joshi justified the continued stalling of Parliament as it was of more importance to fix accountability. “We cannot allow this plunder to continue. If the criticism is that crores of rupees are being lost owing to the stalling of Parliament, the NDA was trying to save lakhs of crores of rupees to the country.