Click to play videoNew Delhi: The office of profit controversy just won’t go away. Congress President Sonia Gandhi is unlikely to take up the chairpersonship of the National Advisory Council (NAC) after winning the Rai Bareli by-election.
Sonia resigned from Parliament in March after the Opposition alleged that her post at the NAC was an office of profit. She quit from the NAC too.
Sources now tell CNN-IBN that it is "unlikely that she will return to NAC as its chairperson".
The NAC chairpersonship is not among the exempted posts in the Bill being brought by the government, said sources. The government wanted not to keep the post in the exempted category to avoid opposition criticism, they said .
The new definition of office of profit is likely to be announced during the remaining part of Parliament’s Budget session beginning on Wednesday.
The Union Cabinet will meet on Tuesday to discuss posts that could be exempted from the definition of office of profit.
The Opposition and the Government’s allies, too, have been demanding that the term office of profit be clearly defined.
The four Left parties supporting the Government on Tuesday asked it to set up an all-party committee to define what an office of profit is.
CPI General Secretary A B Bardhan said the government should bring in legislation to amend the schedule which lists offices that are not to be considered office of profit.
“This list may include such offices with retrospective effect,” he said. The office of profit issue was the first item in the agenda of Parliament's reconvened session but "so far we have not received any draft from the government".
"What has been circulated is the old Prevention of Disqualification Act of 1959 and the list (of such offices). Nothing has been added to the list since 1989 when it was amended," he said.
An all-party committee must be set up "to define precisely what constitutes an office of profit. If required, the Act should be amended. But the all-party committee should decide on this".
"Society has become all-embracing and, after all, MPs and MLAs have not dropped from the sky. They may have fought for a certain cause for which they have been given to hold an office," said Bardhan.
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