Tryst with an honest law

There’s some mystery behind the sustained silence being maintained by the ruling and the opposition parties that craved for imbibing 187 amendments in the controversial Lokpal Bill on the nature of debate in the Council of States.

That since the Money Bill had been passed by the Lok Sabha, the Rajya Sabha lacked the power to defeat it has been kept a secret. That the Upper House could only suggest amendments which may or may not be acceptable to the House of People is also not known to the nation.

Various lawmakers known as leading legal and constitutional experts aren’t expected to maintain silence on the fact that the bill passed by the Lok Sabha was a Money Bill in nature and was ready for the President’s assent only after the Rajya Sabha had discussed it and suggested recommendations, if any, to improve it. In other words, the government couldn’t have suffered a fatal defeat even if the Bill was put to vote disregarding the fact that one of the amendments had reached it as late as 6 pm.

Constitutional expert PP Rao says the amendments suggested by the Rajya Sabha are considered by the Lok Sabha and there’s no compulsion on its members to adopt them. However, the Bill stands collapsed in case the Lok Sabha is prorogued without taking a decision but remains alive during the period of sine die, as has been announced by chairman Mohammad Hamid Ansari.

Article 110(1) of the Constitution says that a Bill is deemed to be a Money Bill if it contains provisions which entail that the expenditure on its implementation will be drawn from “the custody of the Consolidated Fund or the Contingency Fund of India.” Thus, the expenses accrued on fulfilling its obligations that have been cast upon the government due to the enactment are also subject to auditing in the similar manner as of other institutions drawing financial support from the Consolidated Fund of India. That’s the only constitutional aspect of the entire controversy pivoting around the perception that the Manmohan Singh government evaded voting on the Bill in the Rajya Sabha as it feared an imminent collapse along with the proposed enactment.

However,  politically, both the obdurate treasury benches and the restless opposition have used the mid-night face off as an event that gullible people ought to view as the seriousness that the lawmakers had for taking head on the law breakers from the prime minister to a peon in the central government.

There’s a redeeming feature of this imbroglio too. Even during the budget session and later on, the government is free to put in some fresh oxygen in the proposed cumbersome legislation so that the anti-graft quasi judicial forum gets the legal sanctity, should it be questioned in a court of law.

At hindsight, it can be argued too that the political leaders miserably failed to realise that they were all contemplating an attack on federalism when they arrived at the consent on the “sense of the house” saying there should be a Lokpal and Lokayukta law for the states in place.

This wish has now become wishful thinking for the corruption suffering populace, at least for the time.