Aakar Patel | Key Bills’ Passage Without Scrutiny by House Panel Is Always a Bad Idea

On December 17, Wayanad MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had asked the Lok Sabha to send the Viksit Bharat — Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission Bill 2025 to the standing committee for suggestions and changes. Opposition MPs said that the bill was made available on the members’ portal at 5 pm, and amendments were sought by 5.45 pm. The MPs said they should be given at least a day to first read and understand the bill.

The requests were turned down and the bill was passed by voice vote on December 18. MGNREGA, one of our most important laws, has been finished off and we do not really know why.

This passing of bills without Parliament, including the treasury benches, having any real understanding of what they contained through any rigorous process has accelerated through the Narendra Modi era. In the 14th Lok Sabha (2004-09), 60 per cent of the bills were referred to committees for scrutiny. In the next Lok Sabha (2009-14), this number was 71 per cent. In the first Modi government, this fell to 25 per cent. In the second Modi government (2019-2024), this fell to 16 per cent. It wilfully undid the parliamentary convention of referring bills to department-related parliamentary standing committees for scrutiny and examination.

The Right to Information law was gutted similarly by pushing through changes in 2019 without sending it to a committee. As a direct consequence, India’s global ranking on the RTI index fell from 2nd to eighth and then ninth. In 2019, Telugu Desam MPs had joined MPs from the Congress, Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the CPI(M) to express concern at the “hurried passing” of bills without scrutiny. They wrote that public consultation — in which groups and individuals engaged with particular subjects are invited by legislators to put forward their views on prospective legislation — had also stopped. “Public consultation is a long-established practice where parliamentary committees scrutinise bills, deliberate, engage and work towards improving the content and quality of the legislation,” they wrote. This had no effect on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and in 2020, not a single bill was sent to a committee for scrutiny.

What is the point of writing this now? It is that the government must learn often this haste and arrogance lead to outcomes which are unwanted.

On September 20, 2020, ordinances that had cleared the Lok Sabha were pushed through the Rajya Sabha by a “voice vote” and not a division vote, meaning an actual vote where ayes and noes are counted.

The excuse given then was that the individual in control, deputy chairman Harivansh Narayan Singh, was distracted by the disorder in the House and did not notice that a division vote had been demanded. Rajya Sabha TV stopped its live broadcast while this was happening and the microphones of the MPs were switched off. (The BJP took the cue and followed the same pattern elsewhere. In the Karnataka Legislative Council, where it lacked a majority, the BJP passed its anti-cow slaughter bill through a voice vote, ignoring the demand for a division vote.)

The two laws given birth in this manner were the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act 2020 and the Farmers’ (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Act 2020. To remind readers: The first law removed the monopoly of government-run agriculture markets, or mandis, and allowed the sale of produce outside these. It also forbade the taxing of these new spaces. This meant that, over time, the mandis, which are taxed, would become redundant.

This would damage the interests of farmers in those states where the mandis were efficiently run and procurement happened to the satisfaction of farmers.

The second law made contract farming possible. However, the law said that aggrieved farmers could not move court in case the buyer defaulted — they could only approach the State bureaucracy for resolution. A third law undid the banning of hoarding of essential commodities, allowing corporations to stock up as much grain as they wanted.

The Narendra Modi government said it had the farmers’ interests in mind when it wrote up these laws (the intent, it was said, was to double the incomes of farmers, which stagnated over the years). But if that was the case, it was unexplained why the laws had provisions which seemed to deliberately go against the interest of farmers. Other than the manner in which they were passed, the laws also appeared to violate the Constitution under which agriculture is a state subject. It is for the states to legislate laws on the subject, and not the Union. Here, the excuse given was that these laws really regulated trade and not agriculture itself. The bills were signed by the President a week later and became law, triggering a protest that became a mass movement.

Like MGNREGA, these were laws that would deeply impact the lives of crores of Indians. The government did not consider what the reaction from these Indians would be. It was at first surprised and taken aback that there was any pushback at all.

When it became clear that it could not actually get the laws implemented, the Prime Minister ignored the fallout for a full year. Eventually, he apologised and retreated. But why get into this position in the first place? Why mess with the lives of crores of people with this level of casualness and arrogance? It is hard for the writer and indeed for the reader to say. One has to believe one has been gifted unlimited power and authority to consider such moves and only one person in this country thinks in that fashion.

The writer is the chair of Amnesty International India. Twitter: @aakar_patel