Centre plans to ease leaders’ foreign travel: Gehlot benefits

Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot has turned out to be luckier than his counterparts and party colleagues Sheila Dixit in New Delhi and ...

Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot has turned out to be luckier than his counterparts and party colleagues Sheila Dixit in New Delhi and Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh. On tenterhooks for the past few days, he smiled finally when his trip to New York via London was cleared by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

But the Centre is now looking beyond that. Wary of the Congress deriving political mileage on the issue of Central approval for foreign trips, the Vajpayee Government is re-examining the issue of political clearance for cabinet ministers, chief ministers and state ministers. It is learnt that the amended rules — which were last notified on March 30, 1995 — will be put up for clearance to Vajpayee shortly.

Review of rules

The proposed amendments to political clearance for foreign trips of central ministers and chief ministers
• Trips for central ministers/ CMs will be cleared if invitation at a political level
• Clearance from finance ministry may be done away with due to comfortable forex reserves
• Trips for national NRI/PIO functions will be cleared for ministers/CMs but may be blocked in case function organised by regional or local bodies

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Although the Congress has accused the Vajpayee Government of ‘‘wanton abuse of federal power’’ by not clearing the foreign trips of Singh and Dixit, at least six Central ministers have been denied permission to travel to the US since last June.

In fact, one of the seniormost BJP cabinet ministers was refused twice. Another cabinet minister was fixed by Vajpayee in a reshuffle as he was flapping his wings too often. Gehlot, who will be catching a flight tomorrow — leading an 11-member delegation for the Rajasthan International Convention on July 3-5 — got the nod only after he wrote to External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha this month.

He pointed out that his visit, organised by Rajasthan Association of North America, was a follow-up to Pravasi Diwas organised in the Capital this year and the main purpose was to attract NRI investment and boost tourism. Gehlot is accompanied by his tourism, finance and industries minister besides officials.

The cases of Sheila Dixit and Digvijay Singh were different. Dixit had been invited by the US Department of Energy to California to receive the ‘‘Clean Cities International Partnership of the Year’’ award. She, along with Transport Minister Ajay Maken, had planned to travel from May 18 to May 23. The Centre, however, didn’t clear the trip because the invitation letter was signed for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy, an officer equivalent to a Deputy Secretary in the Centre, and this would have harmed India’s image.

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The Delhi CM has been claiming that she refused to travel to US as Maken had not been given permission. Finally, it was Delhi Chief Secretary Shailja Chandra who accepted the award. In Digvijay’s case, the Government refused permission to attend a Dalit conference at Vancouver in Canada from May 16 to 18. Significantly, a Minister of State in the Vajpayee Government was also disallowed from participating in the meet. The reason perhaps was that the Government did not want CMs and central ministers to attend caste conferences.

A peeved Singh, citing personal commitments, did not attend the annual meeting of the US-India Business Council at New York on June 2 though Madhya Pradesh was in focus. UP CM Mayawati attended the meeting and managed to forcefully convey her case for investing in her state.