New Delhi: The privileges committee of parliament will meet soon and decide on whether to call India's ambassador to US Ronen Sen over his remarks that allegedly alluded to opponents of the India-US civil nuclear deal as "headless chickens".
"I received the file only on Friday. I haven't even opened it. Nothing has been decided yet," V. Kishore Chandra S. Deo, chairman of the parliamentary privileges committee, said here yesterday. "We will hold our first meeting soon and decide on the modus operandi. We will have to call petitioning MPs who gave a privilege notice against Sen. Then, we will call the newspapers and journalists who published the interview," Deo, Congress MP from Andhra Pradesh, said.
Consultations
"It's only after due process of consultations we will decide whether it is necessary to call Sen or not to explain his remarks before the panel," he said.
The decision to call Sen may be taken as early as Wednesday, reliable sources said. Deo would, however, not commit to a time frame. "It could happen soon or it could also take weeks."
The BJP and the left parties had moved two privilege notices against Sen for his remarks describing opponents of the nuclear deal as "headless chickens" that allegedly denigrates the dignity of parliament.
Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee referred privileges notice against Sen to the privileges committee on Friday.
Advani predicts mid-term polls
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani yesterday predicted that the country would face mid-term polls.
The mid-term poll could be expected early next year as the Congress-Left alliance had turned out to be a "quarrelsome marriage" which was likely to fall apart soon, following differences over the Indo-US nuclear deal.
"The present government would not last till 2009 and election could be held any time before that, in all probability in early 2008," Advani told mediapersons in Kochi.
- Akhel Mathew, Correspondent
