Communal Violence Prevention Bill to be tabled today

The controversial Communal Violence Prevention Bill, which the BJP opposes, could come up before Parliament on Tuesday after the Union Cabinet cleared it at a meeting on Monday evening, Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said. With the Lokpal Bill slated for debate and passing both in the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha this week, the tabling of the Bill to deal with communal violence could attract the ire of BJP in the rest of the Parliament session.

“The Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2013, has been approved by the Cabinet and we will try to table the Bill in Parliament tomorrow,” Shinde said after the meeting. According to the government, the new draft of the Bill has removed the controversial topics pointed out by BJP, and that there was no distinction between the majority and minority communities now.

But BJP continues to oppose the Bill, with its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, writing to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently, terming the bill as “utterly ill-conceived, poorly drafted and a recipe for disaster”.

The earlier draft prepared by the National Advisory Committee in 2011 was bitterly opposed by BJP as it had put the onus of riots on the majority community. The new draft is neutral in this regard as it says violence against persons “having a particular religious and linguistic identity” would be termed as communal violence, thereby ensuring that communal violence against any set of persons will be considered a crime.