Cong backs LBA bill with inclusion of Assam

Decks have been cleared for the passage of a bill to operationalise Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh with Congress announcing to support it after the Union Cabinet cleared a proposal for including Assam in the bill.
The bill will come up before Rajya Sabha tomorrow and is likely to be passed the same day.
After the Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, cleared the Bill this morning, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj met Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari to inform him that the government wants to take up the bill in Rajya Sabha tomorrow, sources said.
Swaraj later told Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad and Deputy Leader of Congress in Rajya Sabha Anand Sharma that the bill have in its ambit Assam along with West Bengal, Tripura and Meghalaya whose territories will be swapped with Bangladesh under LBA.

Azad and Sharma later talked to Congress President Sonia Gandhi about it, after which the party decided to support the bill.
The government had earlier planned to bring the bill in Rajya Sabha May 5, first day of the last week of budget session.

But the proposal to bring the Bill had run into trouble earlier after Congress strongly opposed the initial move by the government to exclude Assam from the ambit of LBA.
Congress had demanded that Assam should not be delinked from the Bill and its territories be included in it.
When contacted, Anand Sharma said "it is our bill. We supported only when Assam was included. We had made it clear that we will oppose tooth and nail the exclusion of Assam from the bill. With Assam now included, we have no problem with the bill. We will support it."

Highly-placed sources said government has already talked to various parties in the Upper House where an earlier bill in this regard is pending since December 2013.