New Delhi, May 31 (IANS) A day after a meeting of the anti-graft Lokpal Bill’s joint drafting committee, civil society representative Arvind Kejriwal Tuesday said they had not issued any ultimatum to the government and that the panel’s last sitting ended with disagreements.
‘We have not issued any ultimatum. We went for the meeting yesterday (Monday), we were not satisfied by the position taken by the government. We found the intentions of the government suspicious,’ Kejriwal said.
Describing the four-hour meeting as ‘fruitless’, Kejriwal said that the government disagreed with civil society representatives on almost everything.
The civil society group threatened to walkout of the panel if the office of the prime minister was exempted from the purview of the Lokpal Bill and released the minutes of Tuesday’s meeting.
‘Right from the beginning we have been advocating complete transparency in the proceedings of the meeting. We have been saying that the entire meetings should be either live telecast or video recorded and later made public. The government has been consistently been refusing that,’ Kejriwal told CNN-IBN.
‘Some people are saying that the judicial accountability bill should tackle the corruption (in judiciary). We told the government that we have no problem. All that we want is credible and effective mechanism to deal with corruption. So bring the judicial accountability bill right now,’ he said.
‘The draft of the judicial accountability bill presented in parliament is completely ineffective as it is not meant to check corruption, it is meant to encourage corruption in the judiciary,’ Kejriwal added.
The committee member said that the judicial accountability bill did not even talk of punishing and prosecuting judges for ‘corruption’. It only talks of inquiring against their ‘misbehaviour’.
Kejriwal said that they supported yoga guru Baba Ramdev’s agitation against corruption.
‘Baba Ramdev has been a leading light against corruption and we support him. If he has any misunderstandings on some issue, we will discuss with him,’ he added.
Ramdev plans to launch a ‘Satyagraha against Corruption’ in Delhi June 4.
