New Delhi, July 24: Former minister and disgruntled BJP leader Yashwant Sinha on Thursday demanded that Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon quit if “he was responsible for drafting the recent Indo-Pak joint statement in Sharm el-Sheikh”.
“If it indeed was a case of bad drafting, as the Foreign Secretary said, then he must also explain who is responsible for this.
If he is responsible for this, then he should plead guilty, apologise to the country and quit his post,” said Sinha, adding that “foreign policy is now under the PMO’s control and that foreign ministry has no contribution to it”. “It means that it is drafted by the PMO,” he added.
Sinha’s statement triggered another row of controversy in the party on “why it wasn’t raised in the LS immediately after Menon made those observations in an interaction with a group of MPs”.
Sinha reacted with a tinge of sarcasm to his nomination to the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC), saying “I am grateful that the party has bestowed this stupendous honour of nominating me to the prestigious PAC after serving as Union minister for five years,” implying that he was expecting something bigger from the party. “In BJP talent waxes and wanes like the moon.
It does not improve with time,” he lamented. With Jaswant expected to head the PAC, Sushma Swaraj and Murli Manohar Joshi are likely to head the Standing Committees on External Affairs and Finance, respectively. Sinha, too, expected something “prominent”, sources said.
-Agencies