Land bill will not be allowed to be passed, nor defeated: Sitaram Yechury

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Tuesday said that the Opposition would not allow the land bill to be either passed or defeated, so that the government cannot convene a joint session of Parliament to get the bill passed.

Yechury's assertion follows Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's comment that if the land reform bill was not passed in the Rajya Sabha, then a joint session of Parliament would be convened, because the bill's passage was key to success of the next phase of reforms to allow the country to meet the growth target.

According to the Constitution, no joint parliamentary session could be called until a bill was passed by one house and rejected by the other. So if the land bill was rejected by the Rajya Sabha after being passed by the Lok Sabha, a joint session was possible, Yechury explained to reporters here.

"The bill has not been passed in the Rajya Sabha. There are various ways in which the bill will not be passed. Neither will it be defeated too. It will be referred by the joint parliamentary committee. Then the report will be examined by the Rajya Sabha. Then only things will happen," he observed.

Yechury accused the Narendra Modi government of pursuing an aggressive pro-corporate policy and ignoring poor farmers' interests.

"The spirit of this bill is that they want to give no- holds-barred right to the corporates, both foreign and domestic, to acquire land from farmers and bulldoze them. It will create a disaster and it will kick off an agrarian crisis," he felt.

Yechury said that the bill aimed at amendments which would enable them to acquire more than one third of total cultivated land in the country. "What is the experience of the acquired land? More than 50% of the land acquired for an SEZ at least five years back is lying unused," he said.