Bhubaneswar, July 3: The run up to the July 19 presidential poll got murkier today with the BJD alleging that UPA candidate and former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had sought to stave off his possible disqualification by resigning as the chairman of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), an office of profit, in backdate.

The party, which went on the offensive after Mukherjee’s rival P.A. Sangma alleged that the former finance minister continued to hold an office of profit by not quitting the chairmanship of ISI even after filing his nomination papers for the President’s post, today sought to rebut the claim of Union parliamentary affairs minister Pawan Kumar Bansal that the veteran from Bengal had resigned on June 20, a week ahead of filing his papers.

Senior BJD leader and finance minister Prafulla Chandra Ghadei alleged that Mukherjee had backdated his resignation in the wake of the controversy. He also accused the minister of state for statistics and programme implementation Srikant Jena saying the whole issue had been orchestrated at his instance since the ISI was part of his department. Youth BJD activists demonstrated near the Assembly and demanded the resignation of Jena.

The Union minister dismissed the allegation as puerile and politically motivated. “The Indian Statistical Institute is an independent body set up by an act of Parliament. My ministry has no role to play in this. Besides, the election process is on and it is for the election officer to take a decision on these issues,” Jena told The Telegraph.

Reliable sources said Sangma’s charge was an futile exercise as the ISI chairman’s post had ceased to be an office of profit since 2006 when the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act, 2006, was amended in the wake of Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s resignation as MP from Rae Bareli in 2006 for holding the chairpersonship of National Advisory Council. Jaya Bachchan was also disqualified as an MP for being chairperson of the Uttar Pradesh Film Development Council. Union ministers P.K. Bansal and Salman Khurshid slammed chief minister Naveen Patnaik for accusing the former finance minister of doling out large sums of money to certain states to gain their support for his bid for presidentship.