Oppn absent, LS clears SC/ST Bill

NEW DELHI: With majority of the Opposition missing, the Lok Sabha today passed the historic Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities (PoA) Amendment Bill, 2014, to include a whole new range of offences in the currently existing category of crimes against these marginalised sections.

PM Narendra Modi with BJP leaders LK Advani and M Venkaiah Naidu in New Delhi on Tuesday. PTI

Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 4

With majority of the Opposition missing, the Lok Sabha today passed the historic Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities (PoA) Amendment Bill, 2014, to include a whole new range of offences in the currently existing category of crimes against these marginalised sections.

This was the first legislation to be passed by the LS in the Monsoon session that started on July 21. The Bill, piloted by the previous Congress-led UPA government, for the first time, says caste motives would be presumed behind crimes against the SCs and STs and the onus of disproving this would be on the perpetrator. Improving the 1989 law, the new Bill includes 22 fresh offences as crimes against SCs and STs to ensure policemen don’t escape their duty of taking cognisance.

These crimes include —touching an SC/ST woman intentionally without consent; forcing her to be a devadasi; garlanding SCs/STs with footwear; forcing them to eat human excreta or dispose animal carcasses; forcing them to vote or not vote for a particular candidate; threatening social or economic boycott; denying SCs and STs access to places of worship, educational and health institutions; forcibly occupying their land; forging SS/ST certificates and solemnising marriages with SCs and STs with the intention of getting benefits of land.

The SC/ST PoA Bill is the same Bill Congress president Sonia Gandhi had recently urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pass after several cases of Dalit atrocities in Rajasthan. The ruling BJP made a political statement ahead of the Bihar elections by passing the Bill in the LS today while the Congress was missing from the House.

The UPA had on March 4, 2014, brought an ordinance on this law and later urged the BJP government to pass the Bill without sending it to a parliamentary panel. The Bill defines duties of non-SC, non-ST public servants and says they will be punished with a jail term of six months to one year on violation of these duties.

Land panel meet adjourned

Protesting the suspension of 25 Congress MPs, Opposition members in the Joint Committee of Parliament on the land Bill today forced the adjournment of a meeting of the panel. Committee chairman SS Ahluwalia agreed to reschedule the meeting to August 10 after JPC members Jairam Ramesh (Congress), Sharad Pawar (NCP) and Ram Gopal Yadav (Samajwadi Party) wrote to him seeking cancellation of today's meeting on account of action against Congress MP Rajeev Satav, part of the panel.