The upcoming winter session of Parliament will be convened from December 15 to January 5 thereby ending the political storm raging over it.
This was disclosed when Cabinet Committee on Parliamentary Affairs (CCPA) met under the chairmanship of Union home minister Rajnath Singh on Friday (November 24) morning and decided the dates.
It is believed that Centre has announced the dates after facing the backlash by the Opposition parties for delaying the Parliament session due to elections scheduled for the Gujarat assembly.
Gujarat is scheduled to go for polls on December 9 and 14 – while the result will be announced on December 18 along with that of the Himachal Pradesh assembly election for which votes were cast on November 9.
The winter session this will be spanning around 14 days is set to witness stormy scenes between the Treasury and Opposition benches.
The Congress-led opposition will most likely corner ruling dispensation over a host of issues. It will rake the issues such as demonetization, GST rollout and rising food prices.
Along with that, the opposition will also rake up issues of financial impropriety and murkiness that have been levelled in news reports against two prodigal sons – BJP president Amit Shah’s son Jay Shah and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval’s son Shaurya.
However, despite the predictable attack from the Opposition, the Centre is planning to come armed with an important list of legislative agendas.
The agendas, which is likely to include a Bill that proposes to ban the Islamic practice of instant triple talaq (talaq-ul-biddat), which had been declared “unislamic, arbitrary and unconstitutional” by a historic Supreme Court verdict earlier this year, would help the Narendra Modi government to effectively counter the Opposition in case of a deadlock forced through its protests in Parliament.
Besides the proposed Bill banning instant triple talaq, the Centre is likely to re-introduce a Bill that envisages a constitutional status for the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) to which the Opposition had successfully moved three crucial amendments in the Rajya Sabha during the monsoon session, forcing the government to withdraw the Bill it had already got cleared from the Lok Sabha.
Also on the agenda of the Parliament would be the government’s effort to replace three key ordinances with Acts of Parliament. These ordinances are – Goods & Services Tax (Compensation to States) Ordinance, 2017, the Insolvency & Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Ordinance, 2017 and the Indian Forest (Amendment) Ordinance, 2017.
—India Legal Bureau