Hopes of SCS on KVP Bill come to nought

Hopes of SCS on KVP Bill come to nought

All the discussion, all the emotion and all the hopes of the Andhra members, everything ended on Friday afternoon, with the Deputy Chairman, PJ Kurien, ruling that he was in no position to decide whether the KVP Ramachandra Rao's Private Member Bill seeking Special Category Status for AP is a money bill or not. So the deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha referred the matter to the Speaker of the Lok Sabha to take a decision on the bill. This keeps the bill alive, and it remains to be seen whether it will rise like the Phoenix from the ashes again. Earlier, leader of House and finance minister Arun Jaitley argued at length, using all his legal practice to good use, to say that the KVP Bill is a money bill and the private member and the Rajya Sabha itself was in no position to handle such a bill because it entailed Rs 165,000 crore money from the Consolidated Fund of India for AP and therefore a money bill and the House could not deal with it. Jaitley defined the powers of the two Houses of Parlaiment, arguing that Money Bill could not be introduced in the Upper House. This was because the ruling party could be in a minority in the House, where it could not be voted out. So it had to be be introduced in the Lok Sabha where the ruling party would be in a majority and could be voted out in lower House in case of a negative vote. Besides, a money bill could only be introduced in the Lok Sabha, as per a ruling given by Mavlankar, a former Speaker. He listed four grounds that the Rajya Sabha could not handle a money bill. Not only ruling out special category status but also any special funds for Andhra Pradesh, Jaitley said that by according SCS to AP, 90% of the funds for capital construction, for Polavaram national project, meeting revenue deficit and so on would have to be borne by the Centre. And the Centre had no money, as he said in his previous intervention. And his political rival and friend, Kapil Sibal, of the Congress said earlier to the decision of the Deputy Chairman that if the argument of the money bill were extended, even Aadhar card could be deemed to be a money bill because it entailed appropriation of funds from the Consolidated Fund of India. The fact is the fate of the KVP Bill was already sealed. Neither the Congress that made a big show by passing the AP Reorganisation Bill in the last Lok Sabha or the BJP whose Prime Ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, during his poll campaign had promised the SCS from the portals of Balaji in Tirupati, are sincere. The Congress had mentioned SCS in the Bill and deleted it from the AP Reorganisation Act. They just wanted to split the combined Andhra Pradesh so that there won't be any modern reformer who alone could think like PV Narasimha Rao, who showed the magic of the Andhras for all time to come, to ever occupy the Delhi gaddi again.


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