President refuses to sign Office of Profit Bill

New Delhi, May 30: In a major embarassment to the UPA government, President A P J Abdul Kalam tonight refused assent to the Bill seeking to protect MPs from disqualification under the law on office of profit, saying he saw no merit in its applicability with retrospective effect from 1959.

While returning to Parliament the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Amendment Bill, passed by both Houses by a voice vote earlier this month, the President also wanted to know if the criteria used to identify the office of profit throughout the states and Union territories were fair and reasonable.

''Is it soundness of the law in making the applicability to the amendments retrospectively?'' Dr Kalam asked.

A host of MPs, including Congress President Sonia Gandhi, Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee and Samajwadi Party General Secretary Amar Singh faced the threat of disqualification under the 1959 law.

Official sources indicated Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would meet the President tomorrow in the light of the new development.

Under the Constitution, the President has to give his assent if Parliament returns the Bill again. The mood in the Congress and its alliance partners in the government seems to be in favour of sending the Bill back to the President.

The BJP, which opposed the retrospective clause in the Bill, described the Presidential action as a ''slap on government's face''.

Party spokesman Prakash Javadekar demanded that the Election Commission take up all pending complaints against the MPs on the dual post issue and pronounce its verdict in a week's time.

An embarassed Congress sought to put up a brave front saying the action of President Kalam was nothing but a Constitutional procedure and the government would reconsider it and reply to him.

Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi said ''there is nothing unconstitutional about the Bill as interpreted by the Bharatiya Janata Party.'' Denying that the return of the Bill was an embarassment to the government, he said it would reply to the President to convince him about the validity of the Bill.

Left parties, which support the government from outside, too foresaw no difficulty in implementing the Bill.

Leaders of the CPI, CPI(M) and Forward Bloc said the government had the option of sending reply to the President's queries on whether the Bill would be implemented in all the states and on the reasons why it had been passed with retrospective effect.

CPI veteran and party floor leader in the Lok Sabha Gurudas Dasgupta said, ''Even if the Bill comes back to Parliament in the monsoon session, it will be passed unanimously.''

The Presidential refusal to give assent to the bill has come as a big setback to the Congress leaders who have been pursuading their party chief Sonia Gandhi to return as NAC chairperson, a post she had quit on March 22 in the wake of the office of profit controversy.

The Bill was passed amid protests by the BJP which had been objecting to the idea of giving retrospective effect to the amendment legislation alleging that this was aimed at saving Ms Gandhi who was acting> as a "shadow Prime Minister" using this office.

The Bill, supported by a majority of the political parties, sought to exempt 56 posts from the list of offices of profit that invoked disqualification.

The President's careful scrutiny of the Bill is seen against the backdrop of his own order disqualifying Samajwadi Party (SP) leader and actress> Jaya Bachchan from the membership of Rajya Sabha in early March this year on the ground that she was holding the post of Chairperson of the Uttar Pradesh Film Development Council.

The ruling UPA government introduced the Bill after a month-long discussion with all political parties regarding the posts to be exempted from the list of offices of profit.

In fact, the UPA government wanted to bring forward an ordinance to exempt the post of NAC chairperson to reportedly help Ms Gandhi to continue in the post.

However, the political storm kicked up by the move had led to Ms Gandhi resigning her membership in the Lok Sabha and as chairperson of the NAC on March 23.

She, however, sought re-election from her home constituency of Rae Bareli and returned to the Lok Sabha with a record margin.

The Bill, which sought to amend an act of 1959, proposed to exempt the posts held by Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, SP General Secretary Amar Singh and a few Left leaders from the purview of disqualification.

While Mr Chatterjee headed the Sriniketan Shantiniketan Development Authority, Mr Singh was Chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Development Council.

The new law was to have retrospective effect from April 4, 1959 when the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act, 1959 came into force.

This meant that the 56 newly-exempted offices would have been exempted from the provisions of disqualification from the day these were created. For instance, the post of NAC chairperson was created through an official notification by the Cabinet Secretariat on May 31, 2004.

Once assented to by the President and notified in the gazette, all the MPs of both Houses against whom disqualification petitions are pending with the Election Commission would have been able to retain their membership and the respective offices of profit.

UNI