RIFT widens over PM's inclusion in Lok Pal Bill

Today’s meeting of the joint committee to draft the Lok Pal Bill was marked by severe differences between the five government ministers and their counterparts from civil society on whether the Prime Minister should come within the ambit of the proposed ombudsman or not.

The five non-government members (Anna Hazare, lawyers Shanti Bhushan and his son Prashant, RTI activist Arvind Kejriwal and Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde) continued to press for the PM’s inclusion along with the Chief Justice and Supreme Court judges, and MPs inside Parliament and even warned that if the next meeting too proceeded like the one today, they would take to the streets.

Hazare, co-chairman of the committee and the man whose agitation led to the formation of the committee, said he was not hopeful of the government meeting its deadline of June 30 for preparing the Bill.

The meeting was chaired by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

Kejriwal and Bhushan said the government’s proposals today were “worse” than what it had proposed in its first Bill, which had been “condemned and rejected”.

The government, meanwhile, decided to widen the ambit of consultations and write to states and political parties to seek their opinion on these “issues of divergence” and get back to them at the next meeting on June 6.

Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said state governments needed to be taken on board as they were the ones responsible for appointing the Lok Ayuktas. Bhushan said the government representatives told them that bringing the Prime Minister under Lok Pal’s purview would make him ‘dysfunctional’.

It was not clear exactly how the PM would be brought under the purview of the Bill and who would investigate the man who presides over India. “We only wanted him to come under the purview of an independent agency instead of the agencies that come under the government which results in conflict of interest,” Bhushan said. Others from the government who attended the meeting were ministers P Chidambaram (home), Salman Khurshid (minority affairs) and M Veerappa Moily (law).

“Today’s meeting was quite disastrous,” a two-page statement issued by the civil society movement said giving details of the demands made and government’s rejection of them.

The statement said, “Definitely, the government’s intentions are suspect. Please prepare yourself for the next huge movement in the country. We will go to government meetings in the next few meetings.”

“We will try our best to persuade the government to a strong and effective Lokpal Bill. But if the government disagrees, we should be ready to taking to streets,”(sic) it said.

The strong statement came after the activists accused the government of being “hostile” and showing “immensely negative attitude” to their suggestions because of which today’s meeting ended in a “complete disaster”. Civil society activists said that if the next meeting too went the way of this one, activists would take to the streets once again.