Talaq bill back in LS, BJP issues whip ‘Vajpayee was sculptor of coalition govts’
IN THE HOUSE Party tells MPS to be present on Thursday when Winter Session resumes; Cong will continue to press for JPC on Rafale
NEW DELHI: The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday issued a whip to its Lok Sabha members asking them to be present when Parliament’s winter session resumes two days later. The whip followed Union minister Narendra Singh Tomar’s announcement that the central government would push the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2018, that seeks to criminalise the practice of instant divorce among a section of Muslims.
The whip indicated the government’s intent to pass the bill even as many Opposition parties have serious reservations about it.
The bill, which was tabled last week, provides for a three-year jail term for those found guilty of following the practice. It would supersede an earlier bill that the government had managed to get passed in Lok Sabha in December last year. The previous bill sought to make instant divorce a punishable, cognisable and a non-bailable offence.
The government was forced to issue an ordinance or executive order to criminalise the practice in September 2018 after failing to have the earlier bill passed in the Rajya Sabha. The revised bill includes bail provisions as part of attempts to soften some aspects of the proposed law.
Opposition Congress leader Shashi Tharoor last week opposed the fresh bill saying “it has no procedural safeguards to prevent its misuse”.
He added that the bill “conflates civil law with criminal law by criminalising a wrong form of divorce and by criminalising an act which is already legally null and void”. The Supreme Court had banned the instant divorce, calling the practice “unconstitutional” in August 2017.
Tharoor called the proposed law “an attempt in creating a class-specific legislation on the grounds of religion, instead of focusing on the larger issue of mistreatment and desertion of wives and dependents”.
The Congress, which has 47 members in the Lower House , is likely to aggressively reiterate its demand for a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probe into the Rafale aircraft deal, days after the Supreme Court ruled out any court-monitored probe into it.
The Congress or other Opposition parties had not issued any whip until Tuesday evening. A Congress functionary said, “It is not our issue. We want a JPC on Rafale before anything else.”
But leaders of other Opposition parties indicated they will eventually issue whips to ensure a large presence in the House to counter the plan to push the bill. NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has described Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the “sculptor” of coalition governments in the country.
“The ability to connect people made Atalji the sculptor of successful coalition politics,’’modi wrote in his tribute to the former Prime Minister in a special edition of Panchjanya, a weekly magazine published by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’S ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Modi wrote coalition governments in the country before 1999 were either short-lived or would collapse because of contradictions. “But Atalji showed that even the impossible can be made possible. He successfully ran a coalition government for the first time in the country,” he wrote, referring to the Bjp-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, which completed its five-year term in 2004 with Vajpayee holding the top post of the prime minister.
Vajpayee, who was Panchjanya’s first editor, had earlier lost power after the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam withdrew support from his government in 1999.
Modi is learnt to have written the tribute for Vajpayee, whose 94th birth anniversary was observed on Tuesday, on his way to Argentina for the G-20 summit in November.
The tribute is part of the special issue that also includes pieces of RSS general secretary, Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi, Janata Dal-united leader, KC Tyagi, and Union minister Nitin Gadkari among others.
Joshi’s piece, too, refers to the coalition government which Vajpayee led. “When he was the prime minister, he led a coalition of 20-22 parties and he was pained by the fact that all his ideas could not be implemented… but he understood that running the government was the priority. To prove that a non-congress government can also last five years was a challenge then,” Joshi wrote.
In a piece on the backroom negotiations when an Indian Airlines plane was hijacked in 1999, Prof Santosh Kumar Tiwari wrote about the pressure countries like the United States and Switzerland put on the Vajpayee government to accept the hijackers’ demands to secure Roberto Giori’s release.
Giori’s company, De La Rue Giori, had a monopoly on money printing machines and printed currencies of about 150 countries.
“There are many people who said Vajpayee caved in before the demands of the terrorists, the piece will shed light on the incidents that led to the decision,” said Panchjanya editor Hitesh Shankar.