Expending fire and self-righteousness in equal measure, Defence Minister George Fernandes told the Lok Sabha this evening that he was incorruptible and had fought against corruption all his life. The Congress decision to lift its boycott against Fernandes, at least for today, injected new life in the former stormy petrel of Indian politics and he used the opportunity to hit out at the opposition for making ‘‘baseless’’ charges and challenging the leader of opposition ‘‘to bring evidence and substantiate the charges.’’ In his 90-minute intervention in the debate on the no-confidence motion, Fernandes managed to rile Congress members by accusing them of attacking the armed forces. Later, he got as good as he gave when Jaipal Reddy took the floor and focused on the Tehelka tapes and the CVC-PAC issue, in course of which he punched many a hole in Fernandes’s holier-than-thou armour. As soon as the defence minister rose to speak, the left parties and Rashtriya Janata Dal members staged a walkout but the Congress chose to stay behind. But that did nothing to mollify Fernandes who started on a high-pitched emotive note and maintained the pitch throughout. Speaking in Hindi, Fernandes said for the past 22 months the government had been accused of ‘‘playing with the lives of the jawans’’ and asserted repeatedly that ‘‘I have spent 35 years in the House—not to suck the blood of jawans but to protect this country.’’ He then took up the various charges levelled against the defence ministry— the coffin scam, the lack of vigilance that led to Kargil, the Hilkaka episode, and the refusal to hand over the CVC report to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC)—and defended the defence ministry on all counts. His charge that the Congress was casting aspersions on the integrity of the armed forces led to a furore with Congress leader Shivraj Patil stating: ‘‘We are charging the defence ministry, the defence minister, the government and its officials — we are not charging the defence forces.’’ They also pointed out that the irregularities in the coffin deal were revealed by the CAG report and the charge of intelligence failure in Kargil was contained in the Subramanyam report. Fernandes, however, persisted with the claim that honesty, integrity and transparency were his personal hallmarks and were reflected in the defence ministry’s functioning. ‘‘Mujhe kharidne wala koi paida nahin hua hain. Main sari zindagi bhrastachar ke khilaf lada hoon,’’ There is no one born who can buy me. I have fought corruption all my life), he stated. He also took potshots at Sonia Gandhi by asking her to “help us bring back Quattrochi’’ if she was serious about fighting corruption and read out from a book by former US ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan in which he alleged that the Americans had financed the Congress on two occasions to prevent ‘‘prospective Communist victories.’’ In his long speech, Fernandes avoided the Tehelka issue altogether. It was left to Jaipal Reddy to recapitulate the Tehelka saga which had cast a shadow on both the defence ministry and the PMO. Asserting that ‘‘I don’t take anybody’s integrity for granted,’’ Reddy said, ‘‘Everything in the defence ministry is secret except to middlemen and brokers.’’ Clubbing Tehelka with all the other scams about the defence minister, Reddy in his characteristic style concluded, ‘‘This ministry represents a misamic mix of immorality, impudence, and impropriety.’’
