Buck stops with me: PC

Under increasing fire after the Maoists massacred 76 CRPF jawans at Dantewada earlier this week, the Union home minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, offered to resign in an effort to salvage his position in the government and the party.

Within hours of Mr Chidambaram made public his offer to resign, the Prime Minister’s Office made it known that Dr Manmohan Singh had rejected it.

Mr Chidambaram’s decision to make his resignation offer known a day before the Prime Minister’s departure on a week-long foreign trip could be significant in the expectation of securing Dr Singh’s full backing ahead of the Parliament session when the massacre is likely to come up. Mr Chidambaram, who had told the West Bengal Chief Minister, Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, in Lalgarh last Sunday that the “buck stopped with the CM” in the context of political violence in that state, was forced to admit on Friday that the “buck stops at my desk.”

Chronicle had asked Mr Chidambaram on Friday in the Op-Ed article Talk less, do more, Mr Chidambaram, “who does that buck (the Dantewada massacre stop with.”

Later in the day, the home minister, speaking at the CRPF’s Valour Day function, said: “I have been asked directly or indirectly where the buck stops for what happened in Dantewada. I have no hesitation saying the buck stops at my desk. I accept full responsibility for what happened in Dantewada”.

The home minister has been landing the government and the party in a series of controversies, including the December 9 announcement on Telangana — “the process for the formation of Telangana has been initiated — that set off a firestorm in Andhra Pradesh.

This is not the first time that Mr Chidambaram has offered to step down from a high position — he had resigned from the Cabinet in 1992 accepting moral responsibility for having invested in Fairgrowth, a company allegedly involved in the securities scam, and then prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao accepted his resignation.

Questions are now being asked in political circles on what prompted the home minister to take this step: was it to silence critics in the party or to project an image of indispensability?

Guessing games are also on in the Congress on possible successors in case the PM had been inclined to