NEW DELHI: The Joint Committee on the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024, will table the final report in the Lok Sabha on Thursday. Though the Bill was scheduled to be tabled in the Lower House on February 3, it was removed from the revised list later.
According to the ‘List of Business’ of the Lok Sabha secretariat, the the committee’s chairman Jagdambika Pal, along with BJP MP Sanjay Jaiswal, will lay on the table the record of evidence given before the Joint Committee of Parliament (JPC).
The final report of the JPC on Waqf Bill was presented to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on January 30, after the panel adopted the draft report and the amended revised bill on January 29. While it approved 14 amendments proposed by the ruling NDA members, all amendments by the Opposition MPs were rejected. However, the Opposition leaders submitted their dissent notes on the report.
Some of the Opposition members alleged that parts of their dissent note on the Waqf Bill were redacted by the chairman without their consent. Congress MP Syed Naseer Hussain and AIMIM MP Asaduddin Owaisi raised similar concerns.
However, Jagdambika Pal defended the deletion saying that the report carried all the objections on the clauses of the bill, but personal abuses can’t be part of the report. “The JPC final report is 482 pages and the dissent notes of the Opposition runs into 281 pages.
How many more pages do they require? According to rules of procedures of the committee, unparliamentary/derogatory remarks over the functioning of the panel cannot be part of the report,” he said.
However, Naseer Hussain said that the members, despite having been rushed through, had circulated detailed dissent notes along with introductory paragraphs and conclusions.
“These notes had to be considered as a whole and if any part thereof was not being included in the report, the member concerned ought to have been informed, Not even a word from the dissent note could be omitted at the whims and fancies of the Secretariat.”