While the government is in no mood to budge on the criminal provisions of the bill, the opposition will not relent in their demand to send for legislative scrutiny.
New Delhi: The deadlock over the controversial triple talaq bill — likely to be listed for the forthcoming budget session of Parliament —is likely to continue with the government and the opposition failing to reach any consensus yet.
While the Modi government is in no mood to budge on the criminal provisions of the bill, opposition parties are in no mood to relent on their demand to send it to a select committee for legislative scrutiny. The budget session opens on 29 January.
“We will not compromise on the criminalisation in the bill, as it has been brought in for a legitimate reason,” minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi told ThePrint.
He, however, said the government has been in touch with the opposition. “We have ruled out the ordinance route already, so we will debate it in Parliament,” Naqvi added.
When asked if the government would agree to the Congress party’s demand to create a corpus from which the proposed maintenance to the aggrieved women may be provided, Naqvi said, “By that logic, one can say even Hindu women should get maintenance from the government.”
While admitting the government’s failure to utilise the Nirbhaya Fund, created in the aftermath of the December 2012 gang rape-cum-murder in Delhi, Naqvi said, there is no point in creating another corpus, since “even the Nirbhaya Fund is largely unutilised”.
Congress MP Sushmita Dev, who first raised the demand for a corpus, said that the opposition will continue to stand united in its reservations regarding the bill.
“The bill in its present form will not be allowed to pass. The Congress, TMC, etc., won’t allow it,” she said, adding that the government has not reached out to the Congress to build consensus on the issue.
While Dev said that it remains to be seen if the bill is listed in the budget session in the first place, it is in the government’s interest to not list it and let the issue linger on, she said. “It is politically prudent for them to let the issue simmer,” she said.
She also dismissed the accusation that the Congress is hesitant to take a definite position on the issue due to its mishandling of the landmark Shah Bano case in the 1980s.
“We do not have any regrets about Shah Bano. The Rajiv Gandhi government did the right thing keeping in mind the communally-charged atmosphere of the time,” Dev said.
“Muslims were scared at the time. It was the time of the Babri Masjid demolition, the rise of the VHP, among others,” she added.
Referring to the decades-old case, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in an interview Sunday, “I believed that the mistake the Congress did during Rajiv Gandhi’s regime would have taught them something.”
Hussain Dalwai, another Congress MP, who had earlier written to the PM urging him to remove the criminal provisions in the bill, said, “They (BJP) are only playing with the emotions of Muslim women. There is no question of supporting the bill if they do not accept our demand for a corpus.”