BJP leaders meet IAC members

Ahead of tabling the crucial Lok Pal Bill by December 7 in the current winter session of Parliament, members of the anti-corruption India Against Corruption (IAC) are meeting political leaders and parliamentary committee members, fearing that the government might go back on its assurance to strengthen the proposed legislation.

The moves are already on. While most of the members of the standing committee on personnel, public grievance and law and justice want the Lok Pal to keep out the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), judiciary and the lower bureaucracy, top functionaries of the social activist Anna Hazare’s anti-graft movement on Tuesday held talks senior leaders of the Oppostion BJP.

Arvind Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan, Kiran Bedi, Manish Sisodia and Bibhav Kumar expressed their concern to Arun Jaitley (leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha), Sushma Swaraj (Jaitley’s counterpart in the lower house) and party MP S S Ahluwalia over a likelihood of the government not bringing the bureaucracy and the CBI in the ambit of the much-debated ombudsman.

The BJP parliamentarians said they would discuss the issue with the party’s members in the standing committee, according to Bibhav Kumar. “Jaitley gave us the assurance that the BJP stood by our position,” he told Business Standard.

Simultaneously, the IAC members have been holding meetings with various parties -- over the same matter. The leaders include Ramvilas Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party, Pinaki Misra of the Biju Janata Dal and those of Tamil Nadu’s ruling AIADMK.

“Those leaders, too, have promised to put across our views in the standing committee,” Kumar said. “For now, we don’t know what they support, or what the standing committee itself would recommend.”

Apart from these, IAC would soon meet Bahujan Samaj Party’s Vijay Bahadur Singh, who is also a member of the standing committee and a strong votary of Team Anna’s view on the issue.

A standing committee member, though, said it would be wrong to over-burden the proposed ombudsman by bringing the lower bureaucracy under its ambit. “That will make the Lok Pal ineffective,” he said.

The MP, who is expected to meet IAC members, noted that the country already had 8.5 million government employees, who would come under the Lok Pal. “The CBI must be made independent. Also, the government is soon bringing a Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill for the judiciary,” he added.