India prime minister backs under-fire ministers

New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s decision to back his two senior colleagues has put the ruling Congress party in a bind.

A section of the party feels the positions of railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal and law minister Ashwani Kumar has become untenable and that they should have been asked to quit.

The opposition has already made it clear that unless the two ministers are fired, they would not let the parliament function.

“Sack the two ministers and run the House,” was the curt response of leader of opposition Sushma Swaraj after her Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) forced day-long adjournments of both the Houses.

The current budget session of parliament is slated to end on Friday. The tough opposition stand has raised questions over the government’s ability to get two ambitious bills passed, including the food security bill and land acquisition bill that the government wanted to get through in this session.

Bansal is facing the heat after his nephew was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for accepting Rs9 million (Dh610,000) as an advance bribe to get a railway board member transferred to a lucrative post within the railway ministry. Kumar has been in trouble ever since the CBI disclosed that he had vetted its status report on the coal block allocation scam that was presented to the Supreme Court.

Passage of the food security bill, which was part of the Congress party’s manifesto for 2009 general elections is crucial for the party in the run up to the next year’s general elections. The bill, if passed, will ensure supply of rice at the highly subsidised rate of Rs3 per kg and wheat at Rs2 per kg. It is expected to benefit 67 per cent of India’s population of more than a billion. It will also make sure that no one would die of hunger in the country.

The core group of the Congress party, including party chief Sonia Gandhi, prime minister Singh, minister for parliamentary affairs Kamal Nath and Sonia’s political secretary Ahmed Patel met on Tuesday to weigh the options in view of the continued logjam in parliament.

The government has two options: issuing the Presidential ordnance after the parliament session ends or getting the bill passed amidst din and disruptions. However, many within the party and the government are of the opinion that such a crucial bill should not be passed without debate.

BJP has put the onus squarely on the treasury benches to ensure parliament functions properly. “There will be no compromise on corruption... disruptions are also a part of parliamentary tradition,” BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

Parliament has functioned for just 10 hours ever since it reassembled after the month-long recess on April 23.