“Wider Consultations with Experts and General Public Needed on Three Bills Overhauling Criminal Justice System:” Congress

Manas Dasgupta

NEW DELHI, Aug 13: The Congress has called for wider consultations involving experts and the general public on the three Bills that seek to overhaul the country’s criminal justice system to avoid the “trap of bulldozing the entire criminal law structure” without discussion.

The Congress general secretary Randeep Surjewala on Sunday pointed out that the union home minister Amit Shah on Friday introduced in the Lok Sabha three Bills from its “black magic hat” thereby restructuring the nation’s entire criminal law apparatus in a “clandestine, hidden and opaque manner” without any prior intimation or public consultation or inviting suggestions from legal experts, jurists, criminologists and other stakeholders.

“The introductory remarks of the Home Minister gave away the fact that Amit Shah is himself was out of depth, ignorant and oblivious to the entire exercise,” the Congress leader said. “Other than some credit seeking and point scoring in desperation, a hidden exercise, away from the public glare or stakeholders’ suggestions and wisdom, cannot serve the public purpose of reforming the criminal law structure of the country,” he said.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah introduced the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) Bill, 2023; Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) Bill, 2023; and Bharatiya Sakshya (BS) Bill, 2023 that will replace three British era acts the Indian Penal Code, 1860, Criminal Procedure Act, 1898, and Indian Evidence Act, 1872, respectively. The Minister also urged Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to refer the three bills for examination by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs.

In a detailed analysis, Surjewala countered Shah’s remarks on the changes made through the Bills and alleged that he had “lied and misled” on many points of the proposed legislations. “While the Bills have been referred to the Select Committee of Parliament, the Bills and their provisions must be thrown open for a larger public debate by judges, lawyers, jurists, criminologists, reformers, stakeholders and the general public in order to stay away from the trap of bulldozing the entire criminal law structure without discussion that is so ingrained in the DNA of the BJP government,” he said. “We hope that better sense will prevail,” he added.

Congress MP Manish Tewari has also called for wider consultations on the bills. “Some of these acts, especially CrPC, have state amendments given that law and order is a state subject. Each provision in each of these enactments has been extensively litigated over the past 150-100 years and the interpretation of each provision has been settled by judicial pronouncements by the privy council, federal court, Supreme Court, various high courts and in some cases even by subordinate courts,” Tewari said.

The three new Bills introduced by Shah and referred to the Standing Committee on Home Affairs need to be examined critically provision by provision in the light of judicial pronouncements interpreting them, he said. “It therefore is imperative that a Joint Committee of Parliament consisting of lawyers, retired judges, former police officials/civil servants, jurists and members active in human, women and civil rights movements should be constituted by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar to examine all these three bills very very critically,” Tewari said.

These Bills have serious implications on the fundamental rights enshrined in Part -III of the Constitution of India especially the Golden Triangle of rights Article-14, 19 and 21, he asserted. Among other things, the three Bills propose to repeal the sedition law and introduce a new provision with a wider definition of the offence.

Besides defining terrorism for the first time, the changes aimed at transforming the country’s criminal justice system include provisions for maximum capital punishment for mob lynching, sexual assault of minors, maximum imprisonment of 20 years for all types of gang rape and community service as one of the punishments for first-time petty offences.