Jaitley attacks Opposition over Land Bill issue

This debate is not about farmer and anti-farmer, this debate is about adding to India's poverty and making India poorer, he said

Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday took the fight over the land acquisition Bill to the Opposition, alleging “are we reaching a stage where industry becomes a bad word?”

Intervening in the Rajya Sabha on the debate on the motion of thanks to the president’s address, Jaitley attacked the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)’s land acquisition Act as a defective piece of legislation.

Revealing the contents of a 2012 letter written by the then Union minister, Anand Sharma, to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Jaitley said Sharma had termed the Bill unviable.

Jaitley’s ammunition against the Congress took the form of labelling the 2013 law as a threat to India’s security. The Congress law had cited defence and security as urgent matters but not included them on the exempt list, with the result that Pakistan could get information on critical defence projects coming up in India. “We corrected it,” Jaitley said.

Slamming the clause requiring the consent of 70 per cent of the people whose land would be acquired and the social impact assessment study, the finance minister said expecting investors to wait before these two hurdles were cleared was unrealistic.

Jaitley said all the government had done was to add to the list of 13 exempted laws. “This debate has to end,” said Jaitley. “This debate is not about farmer and anti-farmer, it is about adding to India’s poverty and making India poorer,” he added.

Reacting to Jaitley’s claims that unlike the UPA rule, in the nine months of the National Democratic Alliance regime there had been no corruption, Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Sitaram Yechury said, “It will be reflected later, as what was cooking under UPA-I came out during UPA-II. What is cooking now, we will get to know later.”

Yechury took the government to task over hate speeches and religious conversions and for attempting to disrupt the syncretic culture of India. The real agenda of the government and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was different from their agenda for public consumption, he said.

Drawing attention to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech to Christian community leaders, where he spoke of religious tolerance, Yechury said it made no mention of religious equality. "Equality must be ensured as mere tolerance is just not enough".