In session of long knives, last one’s for Shourie

With less than 50 MPs in the Lok Sabha, the announcement was applauded by Left MPs who thumped their desks.

Said BJP leader Yashwant Sinha who was Finance Minister when the hotels were sold: ‘‘The government’s decision is shocking, it’s nothing short of witch-hunting. We are disgusted with the attitude of the government which is behaving in an obnoxious manner. Its vindictiveness has been amply proved.’’

For the Left, however, this was just what it wanted given its ideological opposition to the very process of disinvestment and its traditional hostility towards former Disinvestment Minister and the architect of the Centaur deal, Arun Shourie.

Ever since the calling attention motion by Basudeb Acharya on the deal last week—to which Chidambaram had said he would wait for the CAG report to decide on a probe—the Left has been clamouring for one.

This clamour got reinforced by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi in her speech to her party MPs during the meeting of the Congress Parliamentary Party on Wednesday.

‘‘A few days back, the CAG report on disinvestment on two hotels in Mumbai undertaken by the NDA government were submitted to Parliament,’’ Sonia said. ‘‘These reports confirm what we had been saying all along—that the sales of these public sector assets were done in a most non-transparent manner, which caused substantial losses to the national exchequer…I am sure the government will take appropriate follow-up action.’’

The day after, on Thursday, at the breakfast meeting between Left parties and the Prime Minister, the demand for a probe into the Centaur deal was raised again. Sources said there was opposition to the decision from a section within the government which argued that no case of impropriety could be made out. But by afternoon yesterday, it was clear that it would be a matter of time that the government would give in to the political pressure.

Incidentally, the Centaur sale was the result of a process spread over five years. It was the Disinvestment Commission set up by the United Front government in 1996, when Chidambaram was the Finance Minister, which recommended the sale of these two hotels, owned by Air India’s subsidiary Hotel Corporation of India (HCI) in December 1997.

The Disinvestment Commission’s recommendation was accepted in July 1998. This was followed by a series of consultations by different committees after the appointment of a Global Adviser in February 2000 and an Asset Valuer in June, 2001.

In September, 2001, the Ministry of Disinvestment came into picture and appointed an Evaluation Committee headed by Joint Secretary and Financial Adviser of Ministry of Civil Aviation, senior officers of Ministry of Disinvestment, Ministry of Finance, Department of Public Enterprises and MDs of Air India and HCI.

The next stage was an Inter-ministerial Group headed by Secretary, Disinvestment and Secretaries from the above-mentioned ministries. Then the Core Group of Secretaries on Disinvestment worked out the details before finally placing the issue before the Cabinet Committee on Disinvestment headed by then Prime Minister A B Vajpayee.