Mani Shankar Aiyar is back in Parliament - as a distinguished litterateur and social worker.
The former Union minister who lost the Lok Sabha election from Mayiladuthurai in Tamil Nadu has been rehabilitated through the unusual route of a Presidential nomination to the Rajya Sabha - the first time in over twenty years that a politician of his standing has entered Parliament this way.
The Constitution empowers the President to nominate 12 members to the Rajya Sabha chosen from among "persons having special knowledge or practical experience in... literature, science, art (or) social service". Official sources in Rashtrapati Bhavan said Aiyar had been nominated "under the twin categories of literature and social service".
The nomination, however, practically ends the 69-year-old former diplomat-turned-politician's hopes of a berth in the Manmohan Singh ministry. No nominated member of the Council of States has ever been made a minister, senior Parliament officials said. Professor Nurul Hasan, who was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1968, resigned three years later, before he was inducted into the then Congress government.
Aiyar, who is currently in England to attend a symposium at Oxford, told The Indian Express over the phone, "I am deeply honoured at the President having selected me. This is the second honour conferred on me after the Outstanding Parliamentian Award in 2006."
Aiyar said he had been sounded out on his nomination under the literature and social service category. "I have written several books and have pursued the cause of secularism, so I suppose they satisfy the two categories," he said. Aiyar, a former columnist for The Indian Express, is founder president of the Society for Secularism.
Aiyar is one of five Presidential nominations to the Rajya Sabha announced today. The others nominated by President Pratibha Patil are academic Dr Bhalchandra Mungekar, lyricist Javed Akhtar, academic and musicologist Ram Dayal Munda and theatre personality Jayashree B.
Before Aiyar, the only politicians of a somewhat high profile to have benefited from the Presidential "pleasure" have been Congress leaders Margatham Chandrasekhar (1970-76 and 1976-82) and Ghulam Rasool Kar (1984-87). Other presidential nominees with a political profile - such as R R Diwakar, Mohammad Yunus, Madan Bhatia, H L Kapur (all Congress), Hema Malini, Dara Singh and Chandan Mitra (all BJP) and Ram Jethmalani - have been either political lightweights, or people with eminence in other fields as well. Nanaji Deshmukh, who was nominated by the NDA regime, had been a leading light of the Sangh Parivar, but had dissociated himself from all political activities long before the honour came his way.
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