No name yet: Jas wants to prolong the climax
After promising high drama, former Union minister Jaswant Singh ended up scripting a flop-show here on Tuesday, revealing nothing more that what has already been mentioned in his controversial biography, ‘A Call to Honour.’
By TNN |
NEW DELHI: After promising high drama, former Union minister Jaswant Singh ended up scripting a flop-show here on Tuesday, revealing nothing more that what has already been mentioned in his controversial biography, ‘A Call to Honour.’
This means that the suspense on the identity of the mole in the late PV Narasimha Rao’s PMO will continue for a few more days, even as the government once again dared Mr Singh to name the spy.
The much-hyped press conference addressed by Mr Singh, held primarily to clear the ‘misgivings’ that have arisen in the past few days because of certain references in his book, turned out, consequently, to be a quite a damp squib.
Beyond asserting that the mole was a high-ranking bureaucrat who had, post-retirement left the country and settled abroad, Mr Singh revealed nothing despite persistent queries from the hordes of media persons who had gathered at the BJP’s routine briefing to listen to him.
“Whatever information is in my possession will be shared with the Prime Minister when I am granted an appointment,” he told newspersons. Tracing the sequence of events leading to the detection of the mole, he said that some time in April-May, 1996, he got hold of a letter that contained detailed information on how somebody was leaking India’s nuclear secrets to the US.
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“I later found that those mentioned in it were either no longer in India or in office,” the BJP leader said, adding, “No national purpose would have been served by revealing the names.” He contended that he did not bother to go public with the mole’s name after the 1998 Pokharan-II nuclear tests as it would have amounted to a political vendetta. Mr Singh revealed that the then US secretary of state, Madeline Albright, had accosted him on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit at Manila in 1999, and accused him of lying to her on the nuclear tests. “I argued in return that the US had been wrong in charging India with concealing its plans and imposing sanctions,” the former Union minister said.
Meanwhile, former Union law minister Ram Jethmalani demanded an apology from Mr Singh on the mole issue saying he had committed a “more serious offence” by not disclosing it to police. In a letter to Mr Singh, Mr Jethmalani said “it was your plain duty to denounce the mole to the police authorities...While you were writing your book, you were committing a criminal offence from day-to-day...”
“Your offence is more serious. The public position which you hold and held precludes you from pleading that you did not know the law. You have sworn time and again to uphold the law and the constitution.
“Law cannot be upheld if those who know of its infraction conceal it in their bosom and open up only when they are about to public a book,” the letter said and asked Singh, a former External Affairs Minister, to apologise to the Parliament and the nation. “That is the least that I expect of you,” he said.
Jethmalani said the mole, whoever, he was, was obviously committing offences. “Moles do not act free. They act for huge bribes. I presume that this also you know and have known,” he said and added “I do not know exactly when you made this discovery. But I can safely presume that you were then either a minister or at least a Parliament Member.”
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