The BJP on Monday announced its decision to join the Parliamentary inquiry into the cash-for-vote scam but demanded that Speaker Somnath Chatterjee expand the committee, assigned the job, to make it more broad-based. The committee is scheduled to hold its first meeting on Wednesday.Senior BJP leader Sushma Swaraj told reporters, here, after a meeting of the NDA that some major parties had been left out of the seven-member panel constituted by the Lok Sabha Speaker. Therefore, he should either ask the same committee that handled the cash-for-query scandal to probe the recent scam or include more people in the team already named by him. She said the previous team, which was also headed by V Kishore Chandra Deo, the chairman of the present committee, had four more members — Shreeniwas Patil (NCP), Anant Geete (Shiv Sena), B K Tripathy (BJD) and Gurudas Dasgupta (CPI).She said the NDA had mandated BJP deputy leader in the Lok Sabha Vijay Kumar Malhotra to call on the Speaker and convey the alliance’s demand to him. Malhotra, who had been already named a member of the special House panel, would join proceedings after putting across the BJP request to the Speaker.Malhotra told The Indian Express that although the NDA was unhappy over the exclusion of two of its important constituents from the probe team, it had decided against a boycott to prevent the UPA from carrying out a cover-up job without any resistance. “We would at least record our dissent and expose them if they try to cover up the scam,” Malhotra said.As for the demand made by senior BJP leaders that the Speaker make the tapes pertaining to the alleged scam public, Swaraj said Chatterjee had told him that the issue may be dealt with by the Deo committee.Meanwhile, the Lok Sabha Secretariat is saddled with the unusual responsibility of guarding the Rs 1 crore, which were placed on the table of the House by three BJP members — Ashok Argal, Fagan Singh Kulaste and Mahavir Bhagora — on July 22. The money, counted by the marshal thereafter, was placed in a safe and sealed cover in the presence of the three BJP members among others.Sources told The Indian Express the secretariat has sought the Law Ministry’s advice on what to do with the money once the Deo committee examined it as evidence. “It is something unprecedented,” they explained.
