Dismissing the parliamentary standing committee’s report on the Lokpal bill, the BJP on Friday accused the UPA government of deliberately drafting a “complicated” anti-graft proposal so that such a law is not enacted.
In a veiled attack on committee chairman Abhishek Manu Singhvi, BJP leader Arun Jaitley termed the report a “lawyer’s draft” and said “political and social realities” had been ignored while formulating it.
“There’s an attempt to make the Lokpal bill complicated and disputed so that it becomes impossible to pass it,” Jaitley said and added that the presence of 17 dissent notes, including one from three Congress MPs, showed serious reservations against the draft bill.
The six BJP members, who were part of the standing committee, wrote in their dissent note that the office of prime minister should be brought under the ambit of the Lokpal.
“The prime minister must be held accountable before the Lokpal in relation to his conduct,” the note signed by the BJP MPs read. This opinion was echoed in the CPI(M)’s dissent note by its Lok Sabha member A Sampath.
In the BJP’s dissent note, exceptions were made for the office of the prime minister with regard to matters of “national security” and “public order”. Such a step, according to the BJP, would be in “consonance” with the bill presented by the NDA government earlier.
While the final report of the committee proposed to have citizens’ charter and grievance redress mechanism as separate frameworks, the BJP argued that such a system had to be provided within the Lokpal itself.
Disagreeing with the report that a future bill should not make it mandatory to have a search committee for the institution of Lokpal, the BJP insisted that “the spadework” in selecting members of a future Lokpal institution should be done by “eminent Indians”.
According to the BJP, the CBI director should be appointed by a statutory collegium comprising the prime minister, the leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha and the chairperson of the Lokpal, instead of being appointed by the central government.
