Oct 22, 2024 04:30 AM IST
Opposition members claimed the final amendments tabled in Parliament were not the ones made by the ministry previously.
The ministry of minority affairs on Monday deposed before the joint parliamentary committee on the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024, with some opposition members arguing that the ministry’s consultations held last year never called for the amendments that made their way to Parliament.
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According to people aware of the matter, opposition members claimed that the final amendments tabled in Parliament were not the ones made by the ministry or the then minority affairs minister Smriti Irani after stakeholder consultations.
During the ministry’s presentation, some MPs claimed that the minutes of consultations the ministry had held in the run-up to the decision to amend the Waqf Act made no mention of the need for amendments to override the existing statute. The members’ questions were based on the minutes of the four stakeholder meetings held by the ministry in Mumbai, Lucknow, and New Delhi last year.
The members also asked whether these stakeholder meetings were indeed public consultations as only state government representatives and CEOs of State Waqf Boards (SWBs) were part of these meetings, along with Irani and ministry officials. Two of the people cited above said this implied that “no major stakeholder consultations had taken place during the drafting of the amendment bill”.
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JPC members also asked chairperson and BJP Lok Sabha MP Jagdambika Pal on why certain stakeholders who were not experts on the Waqf and related issues were called to depose before the committee.
Questions were raised about the inclusion of advocates Ashwini Upadhyay and Vishnu Shankar Jain whose petition challenging the inclusion of the word “secular” to the preamble of the Constitution was dismissed by the apex court on Monday. Pal, according to one of the persons cited above, said that the chairperson reserved the authority to call experts.
On October 14, besides Upadhyay and Jain, Mahant Sudhirdas Maharaj, the head priest of Shri Kalaram Temple, Nashik; Amita Sachdeva of the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, Goa; and Chetan Rajhansa, the national spokesperson of Sanatan Sanstha, Goa, deposed before the JPC.
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On October 14, Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind also deposed before it and said it had not been consulted ahead of the Waqf Bill, one of the people cited above said.
MoMA, led by its secretary Dr Chandra Shekhar Kumar, submitted an 891-page on October 9, answering the questions raised by the members in the meeting held on August 22. The first 100-odd pages were discussed in a meeting last week and the next 100 pages were discussed on Monday.
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