Lokpal Bill to be tabled in Indian parliament today

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Lokpal Bill to be tabled in Indian parliament today

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Anna Hazare and his team's version will only be added as an annexure.

04 August,2011 01:15 pm

The governments version of the anti-corruption Lokpal Bill, intended to combat corruption among politicians and bureaucrats, will be tabled in Parliament shortly after Question Hour today.Last week, the Cabinet cleared the Bill and decided that the prime minister will be exempted from investigation for corruption while he or she is in office. With this, the battle between the government and civil society activists led by Anna Hazare peaked.What the Cabinet approved was based largely on the recommendations of the five ministers who were part of the drafting committee of the bill. The other half of the committee - Anna Hazare and his four activists - had delivered a separate bill, which has been completely abandoned by the government. This is not a Lokpal Bill, its a Dhokapal (betrayal) Bill, said Kiran Bedi, a member of Team Anna. Hazare has said he will start a hunger strike on August 16 in protest.After a long hunger strike by Anna Hazare in April which was supported by hundreds of thousands of Indians, the government had agreed that the committee assigned to prepare the Bill would include five ministers and five non-elected representatives including Hazare. But the experiment failed miserably with both sides unable to find common ground on issues like who should select the members of the Lokpal; the most critical point of difference was whether the Bill should apply to the prime minister, a must-have according to Team Anna.Hazares team had urged the government to circulate its draft at the cabinet meeting as well as in parliament. However, the salient points of Team Annas version were presented almost as footnotes at the meeting. Later, Anna Hazare wrote an open letter to the MPs making an appeal to them not to allow introduction of such an anti-poor Lokpal Bill.In his letter to the parliamentarians, Hazare said that there are many critical issues affecting poor people which have been left out in the governments Lokpal Bill, and this does not allow Parliament to debate on these critical issues.