Need to amend Statute stressed

?INDIAN DEMOCRACY stands disgraced today by the reckless manner in which the Constitutional provision regarding ?office of profit? has been misused and abused to serve the cause of political opportunism and it is high time the Constitution is amended to completely bar all members of Parliament and State legislatures from holding any office of profit ?, said senior advocate and former president of Allahabad High Court Bar Association NC Rajvanshi here today.

“INDIAN DEMOCRACY stands disgraced today by the reckless manner in which the Constitutional provision regarding ‘office of profit’ has been misused and abused to serve the cause of political opportunism and it is high time the Constitution is amended to completely bar all members of Parliament and State legislatures from holding any office of profit ”, said senior advocate and former president of Allahabad High Court Bar Association NC Rajvanshi here today.

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In a press release issued on Tuesday , he said the Constitution barred the members of Parliament and State legislatures from holding any ‘office of profit’ but at the same time, it also empowered Parliament and State legislatures to exempt any ‘office of profit’ from the applicability of this bar. Rather than making a prudent and democratic use of legislative power of exemption in appropriate cases and for public good, the State governments had been misusing this legislative power, he asserted.

Rajvanshi, who is also a member of the UP Bar Council, said that there was now a mandatory limit on the strength of a ministry under which not more than 15 per cent of the total number of legislators could be made ministers. So, it was no longer possible to distribute ministership to as many members of an assembly as required for the survival of a minority party in power.

Accordingly, a new but unethical escape route had been found to award various offices of profit, such as chairmanship of corporations to legislators to win their loyalty and support on the floor of the House. And by misusing their legislative power, such governments had been making laws to exempt the ‘office of the profit’ held by such won-over legislators from the Constitutional bar.

This was what was done recently by the UP Government and this was what had been done only a few days ago by the Jharkhand Government, he said. And this was what almost all the parties at the Centre would now want the Manmohan Singh government to do by introducing a bill in Parliament. Needless to say, such misuse of the Constitutional provision promoted corruption among elected representatives of the people, besides tarnishing the image of Indian democracy, said Rajvanshi.