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Thursday March 17, 4:00 AM

Left, BJP refuse to bite Patent Bill By ENS Economic Bureau

With both BJP and the Left parties putting their foot down, the UPA government is finding it extremely difficult to push through the Patents (Amendment) Bill in its present form.

Desperate to convince both friends and foes, the government met both Left Parliamentarians and the BJP leadership on Wednesday afternoon, but appeared to have made little headway. The government's logic that it is under international obligation, as a signatory, to enforce the bill, found no takers in both the BJP and Left camps.

With Left MPs refusing to fall in line to allow the passage of the bill as it has been envisaged, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath turned the BJP's help, again unsuccessfully.

Kamal Nath called on BJP President L.K. Advani in his chambers in Parliament on Wednesday to discuss the bill. He argued that the bill, after all, had been initially moved by the NDA government. But Advani insisted that the bill be sent to the Standing Committee for detailed discussions, before moving it in Parliament.

This was as per BJP's earlier stance and the party been quite vocal about it since Tuesday. After Wednesday's meeting, Advani told The Indian Express, ''BJP's stand even earlier was to refer the bill to the Standing Committee. We have always maintained that many suggestions could be dealt with in the Standing Committee.''

The earlier bill was sent to the Standing Committee towards 2003-end and as the 13th Lok Sabha was dissolved soon after, it never got discussed, Advani said. The party now wants the UPA government to follow the same route and not rush it through Parliament.

Open defiance

. Left continues to oppose provisions in Bill . BJP opposes it more for political reasons . Patents Ordinance to lapse sans passage by next week Advani said Nath agreed to ''consider'' the suggestion and would get back to him after discussing it with his Cabinet colleagues.

Unlike the Left, which has consistently opposed many provisions in the Patents Bill, the BJP has no ideological problems with it. The party has decided to oppose the bill more for political reasons, sources said.

If the bill is not passed by next week, the Patents Ordinance issued by the government in December will lapse, and a fresh ordinance will have to be issued. But senior Left leaders have been quite critical and have said they did not ''understand why the government was not inserting protection clauses permitted under the Doha declaration.''

A senior Left leader who has been part of the negotiating team said, ''Those protection clauses can give our domestic industries some leeway to operate, but the government would not for unspecified reasons be taking recourse to them.''

Other Left leaders said one could understand the Trips requirement and the obligations the country had to fulfil. But, they said, there were provisions in the proposed Amendment Bill which came under the Trips plus category.

Senior CPM Politburo member Prakash Karat said in its present form the bill was unacceptable. Those Left leaders, who attended Wednesday's UPA-Left meeting in Parliament on Patents (Amendment) Bill, said it was ''inconclusive''. The Left said till now the UPA government appeared not to have climbed down on any of the key issues on which it held a diametrically opposite point of view.