BackGST bill: Time runs out as a united opposition stymies NDA
Govt faces difficult task of pushing bill through after suspension of 25 Congress MPs united opposition parties
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New Delhi: The clock is ticking for the passage of the constitutional amendment bill to roll out the goods and services tax (GST) as the prospects of Parliament resuming legislative business fade, with only eight days remaining in the ongoing monsoon session.
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government now faces the difficult task of pushing through the bill in a Parliament where the five-day suspension of 25 Lok Sabha members of the Congress by speaker Sumitra Mahajan on Tuesday has united opposition parties.
On Tuesday, when the Congress staged a protest on the grounds of Parliament, political parties including those from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led NDA and the opposition were trying to convince Mahajan to revoke the suspension.
“Discussions are going on. Let us see what the speaker decides," said a senior NDA leader on condition of anonymity.
With the NDA having just 63 seats in the 245-member Rajya Sabha, the ruling alliance needs the support of at least 100 more members to reach the two-thirds mark and win passage for the GST bill in the upper House.
Although the government is trying to isolate the Congress party on the bill, its passage is difficult if the upper house doesn’t function. The 122nd constitutional amendment bill needs to be passed by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Parliament, followed by its ratification by a majority of state assemblies.
Analysts say that if the government is unable to push through the bill in the current session of Parliament, it will find it extremely difficult to meet the deadline of rolling out the tax by 1 April 2016.
If the passage of the constitutional amendment bill gets pushed to the winter session, GST’s rollout date could be delayed by at least a year.
GST is expected to broaden the tax base, improve export competitiveness by removing several tax distortions and create a unified national market by removing inter-state barriers to trade. The resulting ease of doing business is expected to boost national income by as much as two percentage points, by some calculations.
The fate of the controversial land acquisition bill also hangs in the balance; members of a joint parliamentary committee that scrutinized the bill will meet on 10 August, with just three days remaining of the monsoon session.
The Congress party scored a political point over the government on Monday after the NDA agreed to remove six controversial clauses from the bill.
“The way this monsoon session is going, it seems the government will have to wait for another Parliament session to pass the GST and land acquisition bill. It looks very difficult to get the two important bills passed in this session," said Jai Mrug, a Mumbai-based political analyst.
Once the bill is ratified, a GST council with the Union finance minister and finance ministers of all states will be constituted to take a final call on the design of GST—including the revenue threshold level beyond which the tax will be applicable and the tax rate under the indirect tax regime.
Once these are finalized, they will be incorporated in the model GST laws that have to be passed by Parliament. The central government and the states have been working on these three laws—the central GST law, the state GST law and the integrated GST law—for governing inter-state sales.
“Today, key bills including GST, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation (Second Amendment) Bill, the Electricity Amendment Bill, etc., are pending discussion and passage. We would sincerely wish that attention can be devoted to these and other important economic issues. These are collective responsibilities," Sumit Mazumder, president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), said in a statement.
“The pace of reforms that we have seen in the last two sessions of Parliament should have continued unabated in this session too. This is imperative for the economy," he said.
On Tuesday, the Rajya Sabha was adjourned over repeated disruptions by opposition parties over the suspension of the Congress Lok Sabha MPs.
The Congress, supported by other parties, has disrupted monsoon session proceedings demanding the resignation of external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje and Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
The party is targeting Swaraj and Raje for interceding with British authorities on behalf of former cricket administrator Lalit Modi, who is being investigated by Indian agencies for alleged financial irregularities in the conduct of the Indian Premier League. It wants Chouhan to quit over a scandal linked to a state entrance test for admission to professional colleges and irregularities in government job recruitment.
The Lok Sabha on Tuesday passed the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Bill, 2014. The bill aims to prevent offences against members of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes and provides for special courts to deal with such offences.
Veterans of the Congress, including party president Sonia Gandhi and former prime minister Manmohan Singh, were in attendance near the Gandhi statue on Parliament’s premises to protest the suspension of its Lok Sabha members.
“Suspension of our MPs is anti-democratic. Democracy is being murdered," Sonia Gandhi said during the protest.
The party plans to step up protests against the suspension on Wednesday. The Indian Youth Congress will hold a demonstration outside Lok Sabha speaker Mahajan’s residence in the national capital, and the party’s Delhi unit is organizing a protest.
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