News Mania Desk / Piyal Chatterjee / 18th December 2024
According to reports, the BJP is mulling naming seasoned MPs Ravi Shankar Prasad and Nishikant Dubey as nominees for the parliamentary panel that would evaluate simultaneous poll laws, while Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Manish Tewari are expected to represent the Congress. Sukhdeo Bhagat and Randeep Surjewala are the Congress’s other candidates for the joint committee of Parliament.
The panel is projected to include Kalyan Banerjee and Saket Gokhale of the Trinamool Congress, Shrikant Shinde of the Shiv Sena, Sanjay Jha of the JD(U), and T M Selvaganapathi and P Wilson of the DMK. It might include 31 members, 21 from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha.
According to sources, Anurag Thakur and P P Chaudhary are also being evaluated as potential BJP candidates for the panel, which would be dominated by the saffron party and its allies due to their numerical majority in Parliament. The two ‘One Nation One Election’ (ONOE) bills, one of which requires a constitutional modification, that establish the system for holding simultaneous elections were tabled in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday following a heated discussion.
Opposition parties accused the proposed legislation, which included a Constitution amendment bill and an ordinary bill, of being an attack on the federal framework, a claim the administration denied. Speaking to reporters on the Parliament premises, Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi had termed the bills “anti-constitutional”.
“It is against the federalism of our nation. We are opposing the bill,” she had said.
The BJP and its allies such as the TDP, JD(U) and Shiv Sena have stoutly defended the bills, saying frequent elections are an obstruction to development programmes and simultaneous polls will boost them by cutting down on election expenditure.
