MPs on Thursday posed several tough questions to top officials of the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC), which is considering the Wakf (Amendment) Bill, with members from opposition parties arguing that the ministries were not independently considering the draft bill and were only following the government’s view, sources said.
The Joint Parliamentary Committee considering the Wakf (Amendment) Bill was on Thursday apprised of the Wakf properties in the National Capital Region, including properties located on land belonging to the ministries of Road Transport and Railways.
Presentations were made in the meeting by Anurag Jain, Secretary, Department of Urban Affairs and Road Transport, Anil Kumar Khandelwal, Member (Infrastructure), Railway Board and officials of the concerned ministries.
The meeting also witnessed a heated debate between opposition members, including Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Trinamool Congress (TMC)’s Kalyan Banerjee and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Sanjay Singh, forcing committee chairman Jagdambika Pal to intervene.
The ministries argued that the Waqf (Amendment) Bill would help them remove encroachments on government land and speed up the completion of development projects.
Opposition members argued that existing laws provide for challenge in case a property has been wrongly notified as Waqf, while the government is saying that no questions should be asked if it claims such property.
An opposition party member said, “All the three ministries have only supported the stand of the central government without any thought.” Officials of the Ministry of Urban Affairs briefed the committee about the process of land acquisition done by the then British government in 1911 to build the city of Delhi.
Parliamentary sources said a heated debate broke out during the meeting when officials of the Urban Affairs Ministry failed to answer members’ questions on the land acquisition process adopted by the British administration. “There was also an attempt to suppress some information,” claimed an opposition member in the committee headed by senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jagdambika Pal.
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