GST Bill: Jaitley’s last gasp bid fails

In the latest development, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s meeting with senior Congress leader Anand Sharma at lunch to end Parliament logjam remained “inconclusive” signalling that the current session of the House is heading towards a “wash out.”

Since there are just six working days of the session left and the Congress is saying that it needs time to study the government’s proposals to address what it has called three non-negotiable changes in the Bill, the chances of the GST Bill being passed in the current session of Parliament are becoming bleaker.

According to sources, the government is expected to have another meeting with Mallikarjun Kharge after he is back in Delhi.

Members of Opposition parties, including parliamentarians of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Trinamool Congress (TMC) protested in the House over the demolition of slums in the national Capital by the Railways. The TMC protest was led by Birbhum MP Shatabdi Roy, who raised slogans against the wrongdoing of the government. 

Expressing his disappointment over recent developments on Parliament logjam, Jaitley on Monday said: “The last session of Parliament did not function. The current session of Parliament is also threatened with a wash out. The reasons for the wash out of the current session keep changing by the hour.” Parliamentary Affairs Minister Venkaiah Naidu too was present at the lunch meeting where the government reportedly told the Congress that it was ready to abolish a 1 per cent additional tax on manufacturers and look at setting up an independent dispute resolution mechanism for GST, two key demands of the main Opposition party.

According to sources, what it has not agreed to is pre-fixing GST at 18 per cent. The government has held several meetings with the Congress, including one over tea between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

Jaitley also invoked Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru to remind the Congress of the responsibility of MPs for governance of the country through Parliament. Quoting a speech on the Parliamentary system by Nehru to emphasise his point, Jaitley quoted a paragraph from the speech in which Nehru had said: “Here, we have sat in this Parliament, the sovereign authority of India, responsible for the governance of India. Surely, there can be no higher responsibility or greater privilege than to be a member of this sovereign body which is responsible for the fate of the vast number of human beings who live in this country.”

“All of us, if not always, at any rate from time to time, must have felt this high sense of responsibility and destiny to which we had been called. Whether we were worthy of it or not is another matter. We have functioned, therefore, during these five years not only on the edge of history but sometimes plunging into the processes of making history,” Jaitley said in one of his posts.