UPA II is on suicide mode, says Arun Jaitley

Criticising the central government over the truce between the two top cabinet ministers on the controversial 2G note issue, senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley today said it was a complete farce, and predicted that the UPA is on a self destruct mode.

Criticizing the central government over the truce between the two top cabinet ministers on the controversial 2G note issue, senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Arun Jaitley on Saturday said it was a complete farce, and predicted that the UPA government is on a self destruct mode.

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Addressing the media on the second day of the BJP national executive meet in, Jaitley said, “The current government would not last long and that the nation would go for an early polls. The government is in a suicidal mode. We do not need to disturb it."

Emphasizing that the nation has lost confidence in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Jaitley said, “The drift in governance is a major concern and the style of their governance is full of arrogance, smugness and intolerance.”

He also called the truce between finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and home minister P Chidambaram an uneasy one.

“It appears to be an uneasy truce, never before do we remember senior ministers presenting before media and the country. Such communiqué are issued when there are difference to be resolved between either sovereign entities or such other political groups which required a crisis resolution where one makes a statement and other says I accept the content,” he added.

It may be recalled that Chidambaram came under fire after a 14 page note, prepared by a senior bureaucrat in the finance ministry and seen by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, suggested that Chidambaram could have acted more stridently in 2008 on the spectrum pricing issue, when he was the country's finance minister.

The March 25 note to the PMO from the finance ministry says Chidambaram could have "stuck to the stand" of an auction of the highly valuable spectrum.

The note came into the public domain under the Right to Information (RTI) Act petition filed by Vivek Garg, a prominent activist.

The telecom scam, one of India's biggest graft cases ever, may have cost $ 39.57 billion in revenue to the public exchequer as per the Comptroller and Auditor General.