M A I N   N E W S

Lokpal Bill
BJP non-committal on attending all-party meet
Faraz Ahmad/TNS

New Delhi, June 30
With just two days to go for the all-party meeting of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to discuss the Lokpal Bill, which the government plans to introduce in Parliament this Monsoon Session, the BJP is still not committed to attend the meeting.

Responding to some media reports that the BJP is likely to boycott the meeting, BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad did not categorically deny such a possibility. Instead he tried to obfuscate the issue saying, “It is not proper to presume that we will not attend the meeting.”

Prasad, however, added that Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley and BJP president Nitin Gadkari are all back from their respective sojourns and therefore BJP parliamentary party chairman LK Advani has scheduled for tomorrow a meeting of the BJP team with Team Anna, consisting of Arvind Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi and Manish Sisodia.

Then on July 2, the NDA leaders will meet to deliberate on this issue and only after that a decision could emerge on this, the BJP spokesman claimed. Two days ago, certain media reports had claimed that the BJP is likely to boycott the all-party meeting.

It is now well known that unlike most mainline parties, the BJP is shying away from committing anything on the Lokpal Bill for fear of either being seen ridiculing the Bill drafted by Team Anna, which has crossed constitutional limits in a cavalier manner.

The BJP, being the main Opposition party in Parliament, is not in a position to support the Jan Lokpal Bill, which seeks to make the acts of MPs within Parliament accountable to the Lokpal, bring the judiciary under the Lokpal, create a full fledged parallel bureaucracy under the Lokpal and take away from the government the powers to transfer, postings, promotions and any departmental action against government employees.

These are outrageous propositions, which cannot pass the muster of any Parliament and the BJP has to take a position on this once it comes up in Parliament.