BJP wants President Pranab Mukherjee to advise PM to hold early elections

NEW DELHI: After sparring with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Parliament over the economic situation, BJP knocked on President Pranab Mukherjee’s door asking him to ‘advise the government’ to hold Lok Sabha elections along with assembly polls due this year to give people an opportunity to elect a new government.

As per the Constitution, it is the President who acts on the advice of the Union Council of Ministers headed by the Prime Minister on such matters. Though BJP has petitioned the President on several occasions against the Congress-led government in the past, this is the first time that it has sought his intervention in suggesting early polls to it.

A delegation of senior party leaders submitted a memorandum to Mukherjee on the ‘unprecedented crisis’ facing the Indian economy which also said his successor as finance minister was putting the blame on him.

“The country can illafford at this moment of crisis a government which is paralysed, a prime minister who never speaks, a finance minister who wrongly blames his immediate predecessor who is unable to defend himself, a supreme leader who does not care about where the money will come from and a bureaucracy which is frozen and unable to act,” it charged.

Alleging the economic “gloom and doom” on government’s “reckless policies”, “inability” to take decisions or provide leadership and “humongous corruption”, BJP said the free fall of the Indian rupee against the dollar was a symptom of the “deeper malaise” afflicting the Indian economy. It said the relationship of the UPA with state governments, especially non-UPA, and opposition parties was at its “nadir”.

Congress rejected the charges saying BJP could not wash its hands of in “destabilising” democracy by disrupting parliament.

“Our Parliament has been rendered dysfunctional as 36% was wasted because of disruption. BJP has become impatient to acquire power. Can people ignore the role of BJP in destabilising democracy? When it disrupts Parliament, what signal has it sent to the market? Heavens will not fall in six months.

They are panicking because they know that steps the PM enunciated in speech and welfare schemes will start showing results in next few months,” Congress’ Bhakt Charan Das said.