UPA government should have cancelled 2G licences: Chidambaram

New Delhi, Former finance minister P Chidambaram on Friday said that the UPA government should have cancelled 2G licences when the scam came to light without waiting for the Supreme Court verdict.

He also said that the mishandling of 2G scam hurt the Congress in the Lok Sabha elections.

Chidambaram was speaking at an event. Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was also present at the event.

He said that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should have refused to accept the ‘first come first serve’ basis of the 2G licence allocation and should have employed a better way to allocate it.

Chidambaram also said that he had suggested that the government should cancel the 2G licences but it was decided that the courts should have the final view.

Meanwhile, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday alleged that the former finance minister’s remark proved that the Congress party had tried to hide its errors.

“What P. Chidambaram is saying is a matter of great concern. When the former finance minister said that the then Congress government had committed mistakes, it only points to the fact that the Congress had tried to hide its errors,” BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said.

On the other hand, Congress leader Manish Tewari on Saturday said there is a need to revisit former finance minister P. Chidambaram’s comment.

“You need to look at the issue in a perspective. On October 18, 2007, when the then Telecommunications Regulatory Authority chairperson, who is now the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, made a recommendation that the licenses with bundled spectrum should be given at 2001 prices, and subsequently, when those recommendations were accepted by the telecom commissions and licenses were distributed, there was an inflection point when reports had emerged in the public space with regard to the process by which the licenses were granted,” Tewari said.

The former finance minister said the UPA would have not lost the elections if they had got the economy right. Economy was a major factor and had it been turned around then the results would have been different, he added.

With Agency Inputs