Floor test not absolute, says Surjeet
Marxist leader Harkishen Singh Surjeet has vehemently denied showing disrespect to the President, and asserted that a floor test for proving a government's majority was not applicable in all situations.
Addressing a press conference in New Delhi on Friday, Surjeet, who is general secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist, charged the Bharatiya Janata Party with distorting his statements on the issue.
He clarified that his February 25 statement was intended to assert that the Constitution provided for the President to act on the advice of the council of ministers vis-a-vis the appointment of governors. He said his statement was also intended to express concern over the leakage of the communication between the President and the prime minister.
Surjeet said he had every respect for the President and that it was the Left parties, rather than the BJP, which had taken the initiative in appointing K R Narayanan as vice-president, and then as President.
He said there were fundamental differences between the Karnataka case on which the Bommai judgment was delivered by the Supreme Court and which is now being cited as applicable in Uttar Pradesh.
In that case, there was a Janata Dal government which had an absolute majority in the assembly when some legislators sought to defect and approached the governor. It was then the governor's duty to allow then chief minister S R Bommai a floor test.
On the other hand, in Uttar Pradesh, the Kalyan Singh government was formed with the agreement of two parties, the BJP and the Bahujan Samaj Party, which withdrew support on October 1997. Kalyan Singh was allowed to form a government by engineering defections, but again lost his majority when the defectors deserted him on Saturday. In such a case, the governor was justified in dismissing his government, he said.
Meanwhile, Congress general secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad today regretted that the Uttar Pradesh speaker had not taken any action on the issue of disqualification of 12 BSP legislators five months after their defection.
Declining to comment on the UP issue and the court verdicts, Azad said everyone tended to forget the role of the speaker who had not taken the decision and everyone was after the governor. The speaker, he alleged, was behaving like he was the state BJP president.
Asked whether Shivraj Patil, the Congress speaker during the Narasimha Rao era, too had not taken some time to decide upon the disqualification issue, Azad said Patil had never allowed anyone to vote unless he was personally satisfied that there was a split in the party.
UNI
Elections '98
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