Communal violence bill: Sushil Kumar Shinde drops provisions to keep BJP in good humour

NEW DELHI: Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde has quietly dropped three contentious provisions, two championed by the Sonia Gandhi headed National Advisory Council (NAC) and one by his own ministry since 2005, from the Communal Violence Bill, in his attempt to make it more palatable to the BJP and secure its passage in Parliament. But the BJP kept up its battle against the legislation, with its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi exhorting other states to oppose it.

The NAC had in 2011 pushed for affected groups in communal violence to be limited to “a religious or linguistic minority” and proposed that a national authority at the centre and a state authority in each state be set up and given powers to wield the tougher Communal Violence Act. Both these major provisions, vehemently opposed by the BJP which felt it was against the majority community, have now been discarded in the new 37-page draft of the bill, a copy of which is with ET.

The bill now envisages that any person irrespective of his or her religious or linguistic status can be considered a victim, essentially adopting the language of the original draft of the bill tabled in parliament by the home ministry in 2005 that said a member of any community can be an affected party.

The functions of overseeing communal harmony under the Act have now also been assigned to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and State Human Rights Commissions instead of distinct national and state authorities that were proposed by the NAC. “We will evolve a consensus as far as possible and want to pass it in the present parliament session,” Shinde told ET on Friday, adding that the bill had gone for legal vetting.

Along with the NAC’s suggestions, Shinde has also binned a suggestion to have the centre usurp all powers to intervene in a communal situation in a state in case it feels the state is failing to act. This was a key provision in the Home Ministry’s 2005 draft in the light of what had happened in the 2002 Gujarat riots.

The 2005 bill had a complete chapter on ‘Special Powers of the Central government to deal with communal violence in certain cases”, and this chapter has been now omitted from the new draft, in an apparent attempt to assuage concerns that it ran afoul of the country’s federal structure.

The BJP had consistently objected to all these three points in the 2005 bill and the NAC draft of 2011, calling the two said provisions made by NAC as “draconian and loaded against the majority community” and the above-mentioned provision made in the 2005 bill as intrusion into the state’s domain to control lawand-order.