New Delhi, Thursday, September 29, 2011: Despite efforts to end the 2G note crisis at the earliest, the UPA seems to be falling in a deeper mess with every passing day. Even more than 24 hours after Prime Minister’s return from New York, not many positive developments have taken place.

With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh scheduled to visit quake-affected Sikkim on Thursday, the earliest the meeting between the UPA government’s big two is likely to take place only after Singh’s return on Thursday evening. What remains to be seen is that will the Prime Minister’s intervention help in ending the crisis the government is facing.

The Opposition BJP has also stepped up its pressure on the BJP with senior leader Arun Jaitley urging the PM to stop defending home minister Chidambaram. BJP also said that the government seems to be falling under its own weight and they are not making any effort to destablise the government.

Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and home minister P Chidambaram on Wednesday took the controversial 2G note issue to the doorstep of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Mukherjee wrote a four-page letter to the Prime Minister to set the record straight that the March 25 note, being attributed to his ministry, was actually an inter-ministerial document supervised by the cabinet secretariat and the prime minister’s office.

The much-anticipated meeting between Mukherjee and Singh, however, did not take place on Wednesday.

The clarification from Mukherjee only seems to have deepened the crisis for the UPA. Pranab’s letter states that the finance ministry note was prepared in consultation with the Prime Minister’s Office and was handled by the cabinet secretary. The letter has exposed the Congress defence that the note pointing at Chidambaram’s role in the 2G scam was just another note by a junior bureaucrat.

Chidambaram, who had promised not to speak till the return of Singh from the US, continued to maintain silence on the issue. He was present at the lunch hosted by Singh in honour of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Chidambaram is understood to be in favour of a clarification to put an end to the doubts over his role as then finance minister in the 2G spectrum allocation.

Meanwhile, with no major statement coming from the government, the opposition BJP stepped up its attack. Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, charged the Prime Minister with protecting”tainted ministers.”

(News agency)