House panel report on Waqf Bill to be tabled in LS on Thursday
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New Delhi: The Joint Committee on Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024 will present its final report to the Lok Sabha on Thursday. The Bill was originally intended to be tabled in the Lower House on February 3, however, it was later removed from the revised list.
According to the LS secretariat's 'List of Business', committee chairman Jagdambika Pal and BJP MP Sanjay Jaiswal will lay the record of evidence given before the Joint Committee of Parliament (JPC) on the table.
The final report of the JPC on the Waqf Bill was given to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on January 30, after the panel adopted the draft report and altered the revised bill on January 29. The ruling NDA members' 14 amendments were accepted, but all opposition MPs' amendments were rejected.
However, the opposition leaders made dissenting comments on the report. Some of the opposition MPs claimed that the chairman redacted parts of their dissent letter on the Waqf Bill without their permission. Congress MP Syed Naseer Hussain and AIMIM MP Asaduddin Owaisi expressed similar worries, TNIE reported.
However, Jagdambika Pal justified the deletion, stating that while the report contained all of the complaints about the bill's sections, personal abuses could not be included. “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 stated that, despite being rushed through, the members circulated extensive dissent notes, as well as 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.”