In an incident unheard-of in India’s parliamentary history, 11 members of the 21-member Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday ?rejected? its draft report on the 2G scam that indicted former telecom minister A Raja and made critical comments on the Prime Minister and former finance minister P Chidambaram. These members of the ruling UPA coalition also accused the chairman of the committee Murli Manohar Joshi of outsourcing the report and went on to ?elect? a new acting chairman from among themselves ? Saifuddin Soz.

Legal circles, however, remained highly sceptical of the tenability of the act.

The drama began early on Thursday morning, in the backdrop of the leak of the draft PAC report to the media. Members from the Congress (seven) along with two from the DMK, and one each from the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) raised the question of who leaked the draft report. All of them also sent in letters to Joshi, asking that the draft report be put to vote, in order to make clear their rejection of it.

Sources say that these members were also determined to revisit the issue of the ?necessity? of the report in the first place, since a joint parliamentary committee had already been set up in the matter. Joshi, after adjourning the meeting for lunch, reconvened it at 4 pm. What followed was parliamentary history for all the wrong reasons.

Within minutes, Joshi and nine others, belonging to the NDA and the AIADMK and the BJD walked out. Joshi had been shouted down by the UPA bloc, which insisted that the draft report’s acceptance be put to vote. ?Joshi was accused of outsourcing the report, of drafting the report in his ‘individual capacity’ and also of leaking the whole thing,? said a PAC member.

?At this, the chairman got upset and said that this was like casting aspersions on not just him but the entire Lok Sabha secretariat,? said the member. Joshi then adjourned the meeting within five minutes of reconvening it and walked out. ?I wanted to say something, but they did not allow me,?Joshi said.

Scarcely had Joshi walked out that these 11 members citing a ?point of order? elected Soz as acting chairman. According to them, they were well within their rights to do so. ?Whenever a meeting takes place without a chairman, but a quorum is present, then the members have the right to elect a chairman for that particular meeting,? said Soz.

These members then moved a resolution rejecting the draft PAC report. The matter, however, is not so easily resolved. According to the Joshi camp, the latter had not been ?absent? from the meeting but had adjourned it. ?Secondly, the PAC is a committee to be headed by a Lok Sabha members, Soz is a Rajya Sabha member,? said a source.

?Joshi now has three options before him ? One, to consider the draft as dead; second, to keep it in abeyance in draft form; and third, to submit it to the Speaker since he had completed the formality of presenting it to the committee members,? said the source. ?In any case, the report is the property of the chairman now,? he added.

Most members not belonging to the ruling coalition decried the behaviour of the 11 UPA members. ?This matter has been completely politicised since April 4, and I believe and many members believe this is just a way of denigrating the parliamentary process and democracy,? said BJP MP Bhratruhari Mahtab.

?This is unprecedented and a complete violation of democratic principles,? said former finance minister Yashwant Sinha.