ongress leader P.C. Chacko, the chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on 2G spectrum, saved his draft report on the spectrum scam from getting rejected by the Opposition members in the committee by delaying a crucial meeting. He refused to fix the date of the meeting for over seven months thus ensuring that DMK's Tiruchi Siva's Rajya Sabha term expired and he retired from the committee. The Opposition was in a majority in the 30-member committee before Siva's retirement. This has been alleged by BJP members Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh, Gopinath Munde, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Dharmendra Pradhan and Harin Pathak in a 9 October letter to Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar.

Siva retired in August and Chacko called the meeting on 27 September where he "won the vote" by a 16-11 margin. The report thus gave a clean chit to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram officially.

The 9 October letter sent by the BJP MPs says, "Sri Chacko failed to call a meeting of the JPC even after you had settled the issue in his favour to discuss the draft report. He kept on waiting for Sri Tiruchi Siva of the DMK to retire from the Rajya Sabha at the end of July and then for nomination of his replacement by Rajya Sabha. He called a meeting of the JPC on September 27, only after he was assured that the numbers in the committee had turned in his favour."

Besides Siva, the 30-member committee saw another vacancy, when E.M.S. Natchiappan (Congress) became a Union minister. The government appointed Congress MP P. Bhattacharya and Rajya MP Ashok S. Ganguly as members in the committee in place of Siva and Natchiappan. It must be noted that DMK was a part of the UPA when the committee was formed, which allowed the government to appoint two members of its choice. Before Siva's retirement, the Opposition had 15 members in the committee and the government had 14, plus Chacko, who could vote only in case of a tie. The Opposition number came down to 14 after Siva's retirement and the government's number went up to 15.

Terming the 27 September meeting as a "farce", Yashwant Sinha said that the draft report was not discussed "para-by-para", as is the practice in all Parliamentary committees. "While discussion was going on about how the draft report should be considered and adopted, he (Chacko) overruled all suggestions and objections and suddenly put the bulky draft to vote and declared that the report was adopted," he said.

Sinha described Chacko's approach as arbitrary and authoritarian. "The report was not prepared by the Lok Sabha Secretariat, which maintains a kind of sanctity of the language. It was prepared by the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Finance in an attempt to shield the culprits in the scam," he added.

The JPC, which was set up to investigate the 2G scam, met on 12 February 2013. In April 2013, 15 Opposition members of the 30-member committee, including Siva, expressed no-confidence in the chairman. They wanted Chacko to be removed, but Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar rejected their demand. Apart from the BJP leaders, the other who wrote separate letters to the Speaker expressing no-confidence in Chacko are Sharad Yadav, P.C. Sinha (both JDU), Sitaram Yechury (CPM), Gurudas Dasgupta (CPI), Kalyan Banerjee (Trinamool Congress), M. Thambidurai (AIADMK), T.R. Baalu, Tiruchi Siva (DMK) and Arjun Charan Sethi (BJD).

All these members also rejected the Chacko's draft report "in toto".

Interestingly, the two JDU members, who had expressed their no-confidence in April (when it was part of the NDA), did not raise any objections during the 27 September meeting, which helped the committee to adopt the report by a majority. The JDU has parted ways with the BJP.