Ramesh does damage control, keeps his job
New Delhi: Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Thursday denied he offered the Prime Minister his resignation but his patch-up with his Congress party and the government is still not complete. “I have never offered to resign,” Ramesh told CNN-IBN. The Congress too denied that he had offered to resign for his controversial statement that India’s security establishment -- a hint at the Home Ministry -- was being "alarmist and paranoid" when it came to Chinese companies wanting to do business in India. Strongly disapproving of his remarks, the Prime Minister and the Congress reprimanded him. Ramesh clarified his statement in a letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh soon after his return from Beijing on Monday but it failed to cut ice. Home Minister P Chidambaram wrote a strongly worded letter to Singh, expressing unhappiness over Ramesh's remarks about his ministry. Singh then spoke to Ramesh and told him that he should not have commented on functioning of other ministries. "There is no confusion in our policies towards China and we continue to strive for constructive engagement with Beijing," Singh told Ramesh. Ramesh on Wednesday met Chidambaram and is said to have clarified the context of his statement. Ramesh, while talking about the India-China warmth developed during the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, had suggested that the Home Ministry needed to be "much more relaxed" in its approach to Chinese investments in India. But this is not the first time Ramesh has annoyed his Cabinet colleagues. Just few weeks back he took on Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar over the BT Brinjal issue. He then locked horns with Surface Transport Minister Kamal Nath over work over a highway through a national park in Madhya Pradesh. He had a tiff with Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal on the Foreign Universities Bill.
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