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I ask the hon. Chairman of the JPC to confirm to this House when he speaks and I hope he speaks, that this was exactly the bogus excuse trotted out before the Committee by the Governor of RBI who is now an hon. Member of Parliament. The JPC rejected this argument. We said that there are huge numbers of systemic weaknesses that should have been addressed, that need now to be addressed.

With this casualness, with this contempt for a Committee of Parliament, for a Parliamentary miniature, these people say: "No problem, we will sort it out. There is just a little bit of fraud in a few banks". I want to remind the hon. Deputy-Prime Minister of India of today, who was then the Deputy-Leader of the Opposition – unfortunately he is not with us just now – Shri L.K. Advani of what he said with regard to the previous JPC Report on 27th July,1994 in this House. Shri L.K. Advani said: "A Parliamentary Committee, after all, is Parliament in miniature". He then quoted Kaul and Shakder and said the recommendations of a Parliamentary Committee are normally accepted and implemented by the Government and went on to add, "I would think it is contrary to all the established conventions of the House that the Government rejects it. They cannot, in the name of giving a Report, reject the Parliamentary Committee’s Report. The Parliament has been insulted". This, said Shri L.K. Advani, is an insult to Parliament.

Is this Report that Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Government has presented, through the Kar Kamalon of Shri Jaswant Singh, not an insult to Parliament? How can the country possibly accept that the most fundamental finding of the JPC, which is that there were hugh systemic weaknesses, be rejected in this cavalier fashion by a mere Minister of Finance, parroting the old RBI Governor, whose mistakes have caused so much of this trouble, ...*……..* I do not think that Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the then Leader of the Opposition, or Shri L.K. Advani, the then Deputy-Leader of the Opposition has been given any mann samman by the Prime Minister called Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee and by the Deputy-Prime Minister called Shri L.K. Advani or by their Finance Minister, the hon. the Jaswant Singh, who was a Member of the previous JPC, and imposed a lot of not only his thoughts but also his rather heavy language upon that JPC.

"If we gave a unanimous report, it is the LCM of our findings. On that lowest common denominator, this Action Taken Report is an insult both to this Parliament and to our concerns."

 Now, I ask Shri Jaswant Singh, in his absence: Is the ATR that he has given us, which rejects the most fundamental findings of our Committee, not an insult to Parliament and not an insult to our concerns?

Sir, as Shri Jaswant Singh told us then, as Shri L.K. Advani told us then and as Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee told us then, constitutional jurisprudence, parliamentary propriety and political morality cannot be based on the LCM of consensus. They have to be based on the HCF, the highest common factor of the Constitution of India, of parliamentary practices in the Indian Parliament as evolved over half-a-century and, of course,neithik zimmewari, political morality, in the immortal phrase of Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee who is both the Prime Minister of India and a renowned poet.