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Don't treat verdict as badge of honour: BJP to Congress

New Delhi: Unfazed by the acquittal of all accused in the 2G allocation case, the BJP on Thursday taunted the Congress, advising it not to treat the order as a "badge of honour" and a "clean chit". "The Congress should not treat the 2G verdict as a "badge of honour"," said Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. The party's "zero loss theory" had been proved wrong when the apex court squashed spectrum allocation in 2012, he maintained.

Though the trial court verdict says that nobody was guilty of corruption, investigating agencies will study the case history and look into it, Jaitley asserted. "The Congress is treating 2G verdict as a badge of honour, but its zero loss theory was proven wrong when the Supreme Court quashed spectrum allocation in February 2012," he told reporters.
Later, talking to reporters, senior BJP leader Prakash Javadekar said that the trial court verdict is no "clean chit" to the Congress. The BJP-led government asserted that the process used by the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime to allocate lucrative spectrum was "faulty" and "dipped" in "corruption".
"Congress party jo chakma de rahi hai, wo puri tarah galat hai (the facade by the Congress party is all wrong)," said Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha. Sinha reeled out collections from the subsequent auctions to prove the point that allocations done in 2008 were wrong.
"One thing is clear that the 2G spectrum allotment process was faulty and dipped in corruption," he said, adding "today, the trial court has given its decision and investigating agencies will see and decide next course of action". The Congress party claiming moral high ground after the verdict is nothing but "facade", he said, adding that the process was held wrong by multiple agencies.
He recalled the Supreme Court decision of 2012 quashing all the 122 licences given under the then telecom minister Raja, saying the apex court had also held that the procedure followed by the UPA regime was wrong. Quoting from the 2012 order of the apex court, Sinha said the court had observed at that time that the government had virtually gifted away an important natural resource. "Clearly the government incurred revenue loss," Sinha said.

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