The chill of political winter which hangs over the Raisina Hill and 7 Race Course Road(RCR) continues to persist even after Pranab Mukherjee left the Union Cabinet to become the country’s President.
Last week, on his maiden Presidential visit to Bangladesh, the mercury dipped further when he refused to grant approval to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s advice on a ‘minor’ portfolio reallocation in the Union Cabinet.
On March 4, a file giving additional charge of the Minister of State (MoS) in the Union Ministry of Textiles to Panabaka Lakshmi, MoS, Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, was sent to the Sonargaon Hotel in Dhaka where the President had been staying. But Pranab flatly refused to sign it.
Sources said the President, who is considered to be highly knowledgeable on Constitutional matters, sent back the file to the PMO, because in principle, he is against giving assent to the Centre’s advice on matters relating to domestic issues while abroad, unless it involves a matter of grave national importance.
Since he assumed the Presidency, Pranab has been in an obliging mood, by approving a spate of MoS appointments and Cabinet reallocations. There have been four instances of reallocation of the portfolios, even after the Cabinet reshuffle of October 2012.
Currently, five Ministers of State hold multiple charges. The ratifications of these frequent appointments had so far not met with Presidential disapproval until the Panabaka Lakshmi incident. Sources said that a miffed Pranab questioned the unseemly urgency of sending him the file when he was scheduled to return the following day.Constitutionally, the President is bound to go by the advice of the Council of Ministers headed by the Prime Minister. He can only send a file back to the PMO once and has to give his assent to it the second time round. But by asserting his right to send back a file so early on in his tenure, Pranab has indicated that he is not Manmohan’s rubber stamp.
Rastrapathi Bhavan officials, though, played down the tensions which had crept into the ties between the President and the PMO saying that Pranab had given his verbal nod to the PM’s advice before he left for Dhaka.
Similarly, the PMO, on its part, tried to explain away the snub saying “the urgency was due to the Parliament session” and an MoS was urgently required to reply to questions raised by the MPs. Sources, however, indicated that the President felt that the file could have been sent to him before he left for Dhaka. The Budget session of Parliament had begun on February 21 nearly two weeks before Pranab left for Bangladesh. The incident has given rise to speculation that cloudy weather continues between Manmohan and Pranab.