PM not worried about govt credibility: Advani

BJP leader LK Advani on Tuesday criticised Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s response to the leak of the Radia tapes while also pointing out that the tapes showed how business lobbyists play a role in government formation.

BJP leader LK Advani on Tuesday criticised Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s response to the leak of the Radia tapes while also pointing out that the tapes showed how business lobbyists play a role in government formation.

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“It appears that the UPA government isn’t formed by the PM. For long, we were under the wrong impression that it is not the PM but 10 Janpath (Congress president Sonia Gandhi) that forms the Cabinet. But now, it has come forward that it’s neither the Congress nor the PM who forms the government,” the NDA’s working chairman told a press conference here, adding that the leaked tapes showed the “confidence” with which lobbyists claim who should be allotted what portfolio.

On PM Manmohan Singh’s response to the phone-tapping issue, Advani said, “He is worried about that (leakage)… The common man's concern is about the credibility of the government. There should be concern about this but that is not there."

Rejecting Sonia Gandhi’s charge that the Opposition was stalling Parliament, he said neither she nor Singh could offer any “convincing and credible reason” for not accepting their demand for a joint parliamentary committee probe in the 2G spectrum case. “People want to know who the real beneficiaries of such a huge scam are. Only a JPC would have been able to get at the truth,” he said.

“When the government is trying to put the blame for Parliament not functioning (on the Opposition) and saying crores of rupees were wasted, we want to ask them if we had not protested would the R1.76 lakh crore scam been exposed.”