Harsh Mander, member, National Advisory Council, tells Akshat Kaushal what the NAC is doing.
What is the need for a dedicated Anti-Communal Violence Bill when there are laws to check communal violence in the country?
India has a long history of communal violence. The Gujarat massacre, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and the Mumbai outbreak in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition illustrate the present laws are not enough. If we have had strong laws, these riots would not have occurred regularly.
The Central government had drafted a version of the Anti-Communal Violence Bill, the premise of which was that the state needed greater powers to control violence. I agree that the law as it exists today empowers the state to control violence and there have been many instances where public individuals have single-handedly stopped violence from spreading. However, this doesn’t happen often because there is no accountability of public officials. In this Bill, there are provisions to address dereliction of duty to ensure that the accountability is fixed on a public official, in an event of communal violence.
Opposition leader Arun Jaitley has criticised your Bill, saying it appeases the minorities. He says, “Offences committed by the members of the majority community against the minority community are punishable. Identical offences committed by the minority against the majority are not deemed so.”
The Hindus are a minority in seven states. They are also linguistic minorities in a large number of states. Therefore, it is incorrect to say this law is protecting only the minorities. I agree there have been instances where the majority community has been attacked by the minorities, but there are laws to handle this.
Aren’t you changing your position? You just said the existing law was not too strong.
There is an institutional bias against the minorities in dealing with communal violence. The experience has been hostile against them. The whole criminal justice system has been against the minorities, in cases of communal violence. It is to correct this institutional bias that we need a special law. There have been riots against the Hindus, but have you ever heard that a provincial armed constabulary has fired against them?
The NAC has recommended that complete land should be acquired by the government. The recent violence in Bhatta-Parsaul is a perfect example to illustrate the problems with the government acquiring land.
One point of view of the government is that 70 per cent of the land has to be purchased by private companies on a voluntary basis from farmers. The remaining 30 per cent can be acquired by the government. This stance represents the worst of both worlds for the farmers, as the government will acquire the land at a price that may differ from what the industry is willing to pay.
Our view is that there should be no acquisition of land by the private sector. If the government doesn’t intervene, the private sector may give the rock bottom rate to farmers. Importantly, the main issue is the future of those who don’t own any land. This is the most critical issue. Therefore, the Bill that the NAC has prepared has a clause which ensures that compensation is also provided to people who lose their livelihood in an event of land acquisition.
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Aren’t you making the process of acquisition very difficult for the industry?
We believe that development has to benefit everybody and not just a few sections of the society. We have for too long accepted the view that some people have to pay the price of development. Our view is that everyone should be a partner in the process of development.
In the first avatar of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the NAC was credited with important legislations such as the Right to Information (RTI) Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). In its second term, the NAC has failed to secure the passage of any important legislation. Various recommendations of the NAC have also been ignored by the government. Why?
The NAC is the advisory board. It has a very clear mandate of being limited to advising the government. I agree that a lot can happen. The recommendations of the NAC have pushed the bar higher. Our recommendations on the Forest Rights Act have been accepted, but after a long phase of negotiation. We have achieved 50 per cent of what we wanted on the minimum wages for NREGA by making it proportional to the price index.
These are nothing compared to RTI and NREGA. Are you missing the Left?
No, that is not the case. It has only been eleven months, and these legislations take time. The RTI Act took a lot of time before it emerged. We are hopeful that we would be able to bring in other similar legislations in sometime.
The NAC has been very silent on the Lok Pal Bill. What is your view on it?
The NAC doesn’t have a mandate over all social legislations. We were also in the process of preparing an institution such as the Lok Pal to check corruption. However, once the government constituted the committee to jointly draft the Bill, we supported it.
The NAC believes that we need a strong and independent institution to control corruption that exists at high levels. The official draft of the Lok Pal Bill, which was framed by the government, was very weak. My worry with the present version of the Bill, which is being prepared by activists and government representatives, is that it will get submerged in the huge number of small-time corruption cases. The Bill should focus on high-level corruption, including the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and higher judiciary.
Second, there should be a number of checks and balances to maintain the accountability of the Lok Pal.
It is believed that the PMO doesn’t think very highly of the NAC.
Our job is to advise from a strong position of social justice. The government has accepted some of our recommendations and it has rejected some.
What is the accountability of the NAC? The BJP alleges the accountability of the NAC lies only with the UPA chairperson.
In our country, we have the Planning Commission and other institutions such as the Knowledge Commission. The members of the commissions are not elected representatives, but selected by the Prime Minister. Unlike the NAC, the Planning Commission even has decision-making powers. Similarly, this is an advisory council to the Prime Minister. It is advisable to give advice to the PM. It is entirely up to the executive whether it wants to accept the recommendations.