Vajpayee opposed finance berth for Pranab: Book

NEW DELHI, Dec 25, 2015, DHNS

They may share a “great equation” but when Pranab Mukherjee was chosen as the finance minister in the Indira Gandhi government of 1982, BJP patriarch A B Vajpayee did not find it proper.

The reason was that Mukherjee, now the President, was not a member of the Lok Sabha, according to a new biography “Atal Bihari Vajpayee: A Man of All Seasons” written by journalist Kingshuk Nag.

Vajpayee, the former prime minister turned 91 this Christmas, had a knack of raising issues that would “never occur” to anybody else, the book said. When Mukherjee was first appointed the finance minister in January 1982, he wrote to the then Lok Sabha speaker Balram Jhakkar “complaining about the appointment”.

“The burden of his argument was that Pranab was a Rajya Sabha member and, being a member of the Upper House, was not entitled to vote on financial, budgetary and public expenditure proposals. However, it is the Finance Minister who presents the budget in the Lok Sabha,” the book said. Vajpayee’s argument was that there is a “patent anomaly arising from the appointment that the member who pilots the finance bills and appropriation bills will not be entitled to vote for it”. “As a natural corollary, the finance minister has always been a member from the Lok Sabha. This is so axiomatic that there is no dispute about this,” Vajpayee is quoted as saying.