Don’t question President office credibility: BJP

The BJP on Tuesday hit out at Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal for questioning the credibility of the President’s office over refusal of assent to a bill on appointment of parliamentary secretaries, and accused him of being “obsessed” with attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for no rhyme or reason.

BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra asked Mr Kejriwal not to make the President’s decision a political issue. “Office of the President of India and the Election Commission are independent institutions with great credibility. You (Mr Kejriwal) have certain political ambitions, rightly so under a democratic system, but for God’s sake don’t demean the credibility of the President of India because in the end you are demeaning the democracy of this country,” said Mr Patra.

The issue of disqualification of 21 MLAs lies before the President and the Election Commission. “This issue is not with the BJP. We don’t have to do anything to it and the complainant in the case was an independent lawyer,” he said.

As per existing law formulated in 2006, Delhi is entitled to have one parliamentary secretary, Mr Patra claimed. “Mr Kejriwal should have ensured its amendment before appointing 21 MLAs as parliamentary secretaries. But he was trying to amend it in retrospective manner and this has been caught red-handed,” added Mr Patra.

The BJP Lok Sabha member from New Delhi, Ms Meenakshi Lekhi, demanded disqualification of the 21 AAP MLAs, saying it is an “open and shut” case and called Mr Kejriwal “new age Tughlaq” who cheated people. “The Election Commission (while recommending Jaya Bachchan’s disqualification) from the Rajya Sabha opined that any post, even if held in an advisory capacity, was an office of profit. This is an open and shut case. The EC must take a final call on the disqualification issue at the earliest. The appointment of 21 parliament secretaries is illegal as the prescribed limit for such an appointment in Delhi is only one,” said Ms Lekhi.