New York, Sept 25: Rejecting the Opposition's demand for resignation of Union Home Minister P Chidambaram, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday said his ministers had his confidence.
Reacting to the demands of the Opposition on the sidelines of his bilateral meeting with Nepal Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai, Singh said: “The Opposition's role is to oppose and there is nothing unusual in this. My ministers enjoy my confidence.”
On a day media circles in New York were abuzz with the news of Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's unscheduled visit to the city, the Prime Minister sought to play it down. “There are lots of things happening in the world. There is a global economic crisis. The finance minister has to brief me on so many things and so he is coming,” Singh said.
Mukherjee is in Washington to attend the annual meetings of the International Monetory Fund and the World Bank.
It was a note from his ministry to the PMO on the 2G spectrum allocation that triggered the demand for Chidambaram's resignation. The note said that had the ministry — then under P Chidambaram — “stuck to the stand of auctioning the 4.4 MHz spectrum”, the Department of Telecom could have cancelled the licences.
Mukherjee is expected to arrive in New York on Saturday night and will stay overnight at Hotel Park Central where the members of the Prime Minister's media delegation are also staying. The Finance Minister is scheduled to return to Washington on Sunday evening.
Incidentally, the Carnegie Suite, located on the hotel's 20th floor, which was occupied by a senior official of the External Publicity Division of the Ministry of External Affairs, was vacated and readied for Mukherjee.
