PM should have scrapped 2G licences: P Chidambaram

Former Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram claimed that the way UPA government could have handled the 2G issue differently and that it caused a lot of damage to the Congress party's image.

At the book launch of Rajdeep Sardesai's '2014: The election that changed India' in Delhi on Friday, Chidambaram said that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should have shown a strict refusal to the 'first come first serve' basis of the 2G licence allocation and employed a better way to allot the same.

After the allocation had been done, when the issue was brought in front of him, the former PM Manmohan Singh should have declared the it void even before the court had made it's decision, Chidambaram added.

When asked why didn't the government declare the licences as invalid, Chidambaram said that they were waiting for the Supreme Court's decision. "These kind of matters do not come in front of the cabinet and they are only discussed unofficially/informally."

He also suggested that the former Prime Minister was aware of the retrospective amendment in Income Tax Act, which is considered as a major blunder of the UPA goverment as it hit FDI in India.