BJP MP Medha Vishram Kulkarni filed a corrigendum in the Upper House on Thursday afternoon amid controversy surrounding the purported suppression of some dissent notes in the joint parliamentary committee report on the Waqf Amendment Bill, 2024. Kulkarni presented the report’s corrigendum to Appendix 5 during the Rajya Sabha’s post-lunch session. In the morning, she had presented the report to the House.
The censored notes from the previous tabled report are included in Chapter 5 of the report’s Appendices, which is titled “Notes/minutes of dissent received from the Members of the Joint Committee.” An opposition member of parliament joked that the corrigendum demonstrated that a minister had previously misled the House.
Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju refuted claims made earlier in the day by opposition MPs led by Leader of the Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge that dissent notes had been removed from the report.
Thanking the government for the corrigendum, Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar said, “This shows that parliamentary institutions are blossoming, sentiments are taken into consideration, steps are taken and this gives us another message, we must take recourse to law rather than engage in something which people cannot approve or is to their distaste.” “We want more of such things to happen. It is only by exchange and dialogue that things happen,” he said. “I express my gratitude to the government because the matter was brought to my notice,” Dhankhar said.
However, opposition MPs were heard to claim that they exerted pressure on the decision. Saket Gokhale, Rajya Sabha MP for the Trinamool Congress, claimed in a post on X that the government was “compelled to table the Waqf JPC with un-redacted Opposition dissent notes.”
“Modi government forced to bow to the people! The government was caught red-handed in Parliament today after we demanded that the Minister state on record, if opposition dissent notes from the Waqf Bill JPC report, were censored,” Gokhale said in his post. “Now, at 3:30 pm, the government has issued a corrigendum in Rajya Sabha and has been forced to table the Waqf JPC report with un-redacted Opposition dissent notes. Constructive opposition fighting to save our institutions,” he said.
Gokhale insisted that the Rijiju reply to any redactions made in the dissent note when the report was presented to the House earlier on Thursday.
