Deciding to make a strong pitch for speeding up the work, members of the civil society on the Joint Lokpal Bill Drafting Committee on Sunday said that after Monday’s meeting the 30-day countdown will begin to meet the June 30 deadline for preparing a robust anti-graft legislation.
“We have already presented a 40-point agenda to the government and now expect the government representatives to discuss with us one by one and complete the job within the time frame,” said a member of civil society led by Anna Hazare.
One among the major point in the agenda is that the proposed legislation should stipulate graver punishment, including life imprisonment, for high-ranking officials in cases of proved graft.
“We will also demand that a corrupt government official serve a minimum of one year rigorous imprisonment and a maximum punishment of life imprisonment. Punishment should be higher if the status or rank of the accused is higher,” the member asserted.
Mr Hazare’s team also wants to bring within the purview of the Lokpal, conduct of MPs inside Parliament, if it is an offence under the Prevention of Corruption Act. A proposal to this effect was made during the meeting of the joint drafting committee on May 23. These issues were discussed by the committee chaired by Pranab Mukherjee during a meeting last week.
Mr Hazare’s team and the government had agreed in principle on a provision to attach the properties of corrupt government officials on completion of investigation of charges against them.
However, there were differences on when to issue the notification on the list of assets of an official. The proposal states that the assets cannot be transferred after issuance of the notification.
Meanwhile, with announcement that Mr Hazare would return to Jantar Mantar on August 16 if the bill is not passed by Parliament by then, the civil society members appear to have raised the pitch for early enactment of the Lokpal Act.
The setting up of the joint drafting committee was a key demand of Mr Hazare and his supporters as part of their agitation for strong measures to tackle corruption in government and public life. The Lokpal Committee was constituted through a government notification on April 9, after Mr Hazare ended his 97-hour fast on the issue.
The committee is chaired by Union finance minister Mukherjee and has Union ministers Kapil Sibal, Veerappa Moily, Salman Khurshid and P. Chidambaram as members. Besides Mr Hazare, the civil society members are Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde, advocate Prashant Bhushan, former law minister Shanti Bhushan and RTI activist Arvind Kejriwal.
Mr Hazare’s team has voiced concern over the slow progress of the bill drafting process following which it was agreed to hold meetings more frequently.