New Delhi, Sept 23 : The finance ministry's March 2011 letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the 2G spectrum scam has put P Chidambaram under the spotlight, but there are documents which suggest that Pranab Mukherjee too had several discussions on the issue with disgraced former telecom minister A Raja, The Times of India reported.
The newspaper claimed it has documents to prove this contention.According to the report, in 2007-08,when the 2G spectrum scam took place, Mukherjee was the external affairs minister as well as chairman of the group of ministers (GoM) on spectrum issues.
In a letter to the Prime Minister on December 26,2007 (D.O.No.60/M(C&IT )/ VIP/2007),15 days before letters of intent towards telecom licences were awarded on January 10,2008, A Raja informed the PM that he had held several discussions with Mukherjee.Raja informed the PM that both issuance of 121 new licenses and 35 dual technology licences, were discussed with external affairs minister at length.
Raja closed the letter by referring to his discussions with Mukherjee,which he said,have further enlightened me to take preemptive and proactive decisions on these issues... .Attached to this letter was an annexure which informed the PM about the new First-Come-First-Serve (FCFS) definition that Raja proposed to implement.
On the same day,Mukherjee wrote a letter to the PM giving his view on the spectrum issue.In that letter,Mukherjee did not make any mention of the need for auctions or market-based pricing for new entrants.
The letter is devoted entirely to issues like tightening the subscriberbased criteria for top-up spectrum,priority of allocation across various categories and the need to strengthen policy.This letter in no way opposes the actions that Raja proposed to take.
A week later,on January 3,2008,Raja received a two-line reply from the PM acknowledging his letter about this meeting with Mukherjee and the decision to allocate spectrum without auctions.
Four days after the receipt of the PMs letter,the DoT,in file 20-100 /2007-AS-I,page 26/N proceeded to allocate spectrum by citing this letter from Raja about his meeting with Mukherjee to the PM as,The policy of DoT as decided by Honble MoCIT (Raja) and communicated to Honble PM vide letter 26.12.2007 shall be treated as policy directive for licensing matters.
The letter written by Raja to the PM citing his multiple meetings with Mukherjee became the policy decision in DoT files which led to the 2G spectrum scam.In contrast,Mukherjee in his role of chairman GoM on spectrum,ensured auctions were held for 3G/BWA spectrum, which led to the government garnering over Rs 1 lakh crore in mid-2010, as against the CAG's estimate of a massive Rs 1.76 lakh crore loss from 2G spectrum allocation without auctions in 2008.
