Even his detractors, and there are many, cannot accuse Murli Manohar Joshi of not taking his job seriously. As chairman of Parliament’s all-important Public Accounts Committee, he has patiently and painstakingly been explaining how the committee questioned the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and now the Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation on the 2G Spectrum allocation scam.Of course, the ultimate 'kick' for Joshi will be to grill Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself, but till then, he would have to be content with ticking off Kapil Sibal or calling former Telecom Minister Arun Shourie to face the PAC.

The 'gravitas' on his demeanour can scarcely hide his glee. In the spotlight, Joshi has revelled in his new role as a prosecutor, maintaining that the PAC is competent to unravel the scam. Pulled up by the party, he has been quick to endorse the BJP's sustained campaign for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the scam. But he looks determined to be the first to complete the job and do what he can.

But, then, Murli Manohar Joshi is known to keep aloof from the party, of which he was once the president, as well as his colleagues. He keeps his own counsel and is often accused of marching to the beat of his own drum.

As the PAC chairman, he first put a spoke in the BJP's attempt to put the UPA government, led by Prime Minister Manmohan 
Singh, on the mat over A Raja's distribution of telecom spectrum.

His actions and utterances are enigmatic and difficult to decipher even at the best of times, often to the discomfiture of his colleagues. Party stalwarts LK Advani and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, managed to successfully build a hype around the issue with Arun Jaitley doing the same in the Rajya Sabha. They stalled the entire winter session of Parliament, demanding a JPC probe into the 2G scam. However, Joshi made the whole BJP-NDA campaign virtually irrelevant by going ahead with the PAC probe on the same subject, much to the chagrin of Advani and his friends.

Joshi claims that he has an obligation to probe all the ramifications of the 2G allotment. Naturally, a comprehensive report of the PAC, if and when submitted to the Speaker, will leave very little for the JPC to look into. The very logic of a JPC would be open to question.

In effect, Joshi took the wind out of Sushma and Jaitley's argument that the PAC was constrained to discuss only the financial aspects and could not go beyond that. He has also implicitly punctured their claim on the gravity of the bungling by announcing that the CAG Vinod Rai himself admitted that the figure could be anywhere between Rs 57,000 crore and Rs 1.76 lakh crore and not the Rs 1.76 lakh crore that Jaitley and Sushma often quote.

The basic objective of the BJP-NDA demand for a JPC was to summon Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and make him testify before the JPC. The Prime Minister smartly tried to turn the tables on the BJP by offering to appear before the PAC, even as he turned down the demand for the JPC.

Unfortunately for the BJP trio, Joshi is far too senior in the party to be snubbed or silenced. The Advani camp took up Joshi's obduracy and recalcitrance with party president Nitin Gadkari, who met Joshi. But that too did not seem to have brought any relief to the JPC enthusiasts. The very next day, Joshi went ahead and met Meira Kumar and thereafter announced that he was consulting experts to decide whether the Prime Minister's offer could be taken up by the PAC.

He has always been self-absorbed, and the problem between Joshi and Advani and his camp followers goes back a long way. In the early 1990s, when Advani's term as party president ended and he had to make way for a new president, Joshi succeeded him. Advani did not like it one bit and while Advani chaired the party for more than a decade with few interruptions, Joshi was not allowed a second term, ostensibly because of the clout the Advani camp wielded with the RSS.

This, in spite of the fact that in party circles, Joshi is considered more of a hardliner on ideological issues than Advani and his lieutenants. He led the Human Resources Development (HRD) Ministry throughout the six years that NDA ruled the country and successfully discharged the RSS agenda in the field of education, earning considerable appreciation for his work both by the Sangh as well as the BJP.

Besides, his name has never been dragged into any financial irregularity. In that sense, he has a clean image. Once the BJP lost the 2009 General Election, many in the party were hoping that Advani would now happily retire and leave the field open for others. He was also under pressure from a younger RSS chief, Mohanrao Bhagwat, to make way for younger leaders. Advani managed to use this, too, to his advantage, leaving leaders immediately younger than him like Joshi, Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha in a limbo and handing over the mantle to his trusted lieutenants Sushma and Jaitley, and by virtue of becoming the chairman of the parliamentary party and also NDA, he continues to wield the same clout he did as Leader of the Opposition from 2004 to 2009.

In fact, the Advani camp was initially disinclined to give any post to Joshi, Jaswant or Yashwant Sinha, and even to Rajnath Singh, in the parliamentary party. First, Jaswant Singh virtually foisted himself as the PAC chairman because the party felt that his argument that losers were getting it all would be proved true if he was denied any post. However, he was later expelled from the BJP on a specious plea. After that, Gopinath Munde, Deputy Leader of the BJP in the Lok Sabha and natural claimant to the post, assumed charge briefly, and as Joshi disclosed later, the decision to conduct a PAC probe into the 2G scam was also taken not by Joshi but before him by Munde.

The BJP parliamentary party reluctantly offered the post to Joshi last March, not happy with Munde for espousing causes like caste census. Now, Joshi has become a thorn in the flesh of Advani and his friends. They can neither openly attack him for fear of the Congress going to town about it, nor can they allow Joshi to go ahead with his probe and summoning the Prime Minister because that would leave them without a political plank to stand on. And, Joshi is not somebody whom they can pressurise or brand a Congress agent or a lobbyist for any of the business houses that have come under the cloud in the 2G scam.

What does one do with a Joshi? "If you don't like it, then you lump it," remarked a senior party leader, smiling. Meanwhile, the drummer is keeping his own counsel and no one knows which beat he will make others march to.