New Delhi, April 17: While the government termed the first meeting of the joint committee formed to draft a robust Lokpal Bill as a “good starting point” for discussions, non-government representatives in the committee pushed for a much stronger law than earlier envisaged, inserting a new provision in their latest draft that will empower the office of the Lokpal to intercept telephone conversations.
Version 2.2 of the Janlokpal Bill, a copy of which was emailed to The Sunday Express by the Anna Hazare-led group, was presented before the meeting of the joint committee. The panel was formed after a nationwide campaign by Hazare for a new law instituting the office of Lokpal to fight corruption.
The latest version has a new clause, 13C, which give wide powers to “an appropriate bench of the Lokpal” to “approve interception and monitoring of messages of data or voice transmitted through telephones, internet or any other medium as covered under the India Telegraph Act, read with Information and Technology Act 2000”. At present, the powers to intercept telephonic communications is vested with the Union Home Ministry.
Another new provision in this draft is for setting up of a separate “prosecution wing” for the office of Lokpal, which is already envisaged to have powers to investigate.
Government sources were, however, of the view that the civil society representatives had actually “watered down” the provisions of the proposed legislation.
“They have moved away from the draft which they had circulated after Jantar Mantar,” a senior minister said but added that such a step was welcome as it showed that the committee could engage in a meaningful exercise.
Importantly, non-government representatives dropped their insistence that only their draft should be considered as the basic document by the joint committee. Prashant Bhushan, one of the members of the committee, said other drafts and suggestions would be welcomed.
Another major alteration in the draft presented today relates to changes in the composition of the proposed panel to select the Lokpal. Instead of the Vice President of India who was envisaged to be the chairperson of the selection committee, the new Bill has the Prime Minister at the head. The earlier versions of the draft Bill was criticised on the grounds that it showed contempt for democracy by leaving out the Prime Minister from the selection panel.
The selection panel as envisaged now also has the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha instead of the Lok Sabha Speaker. The NHRC chief and an Army representative no longer figure in the panel as described in the new draft. Also, instead of two seniormost judges of the Supreme Court and two seniormost Chief Justices of High Courts, the revised Bill now envisages the “two youngest Judges of the Supreme Court” and “two youngest Chief Justices of High Courts” to be part of the selection panel.
The 90-minute meeting started with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who is also chairperson of the joint panel, welcoming Hazare and his four colleagues and assuring them that the government would endeavour to make the exercise of drafting a Lokpal Bill a successful one. He even conceded that the political class suffered from an image deficit when it came to corruption and expressed the hope that the Bill would also help in addressing this aspect. The government representatives though stuck largely to discussing modalities without going into merits of the draft Bill at this juncture.
Hazare, who spoke after Mukherjee, made the larger point that there was an urgent need to clean up corruption. He requested that the meeting proceedings be videographed as it was in line with transparency norms, but government representatives rejected it on the ground that such a step would distract from the key objective of trying to bring out a meaningful draft as members would end up playing to the gallery.
Audio recording of the meeting, however, was allowed. Government sources said audio recording is done in many other meetings as well but pointed out that only minutes of the meeting and not the audio tapes can be public.
The next meeting of the committee is slated for May 2. Both sides hoped that the drafting exercise would be completed by June 30.
–Agencies–