On a day when former telecom minister A Raja completed exactly a year in jail, the Supreme Court on Thursday scrapped all 121 2G licences issued by him and held the entire process as illegal. Not just this, it felt constrained to go beyond the illegalities and decide on the policy of awarding spectrum by saying that the scarce natural resource could only be given in an open auction. The verdict has pushed the government into defensive mode ahead of the UP polls as it endorsed that the national exchequer has lost hundreds of crores because of the scam and, as a corollary, rejected the government claim that the award of 2G licences had caused “zero loss”. The SC ruling has sent ripples of concern across the telecom sector and among foreign investors. The court, however, gave a short breather to Union home minister P Chidambaram. The 89-page judgment by Justices G S Singhvi and A K Ganguly refused to decide Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy’s petition seeking a CBI probe into the allegation that Chidambaram had connived with Raja to award the 2G licences. It left it to the special court dealing with the 2G case to decide on the matter. The special court is expected to give its order on Saturday. At various places in the order, the SC has held that Raja had ignored the advice of the PM and did not consult the finance minister or law minister, something that strengthens the UPA’s defence that Raja was acting on his own. Despite strong government resistance, the court met half way activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan’s demand to set up a special investigation team (SIT) to monitor the CBI investigation into the 2G spectrum scam.
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