NEW DELHI: Union home minister
Amit Shah's "morality pitch" to back the Constitution (130th Amendment) Bill, 2025 met a strong counter from Rajya Sabha member
Kapil Sibal who accused the Modi government of "weaponising" laws to target the opposition.
"I don't think in the history of India, there has been a government which is more constitutionally immoral than this government. Can the home minister talk about constitutional morality after the way the governments in Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Goa and Madhya Pradesh, among other places, were toppled," Sibal claimed. "You can fool some people sometimes but you cannot fool all the people all the time," the Independent Rajya Sabha member added.
On the last day of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, Amit Shah had introduced the Constitution (130th Amendment) Bill - which proposes automatic removal of Prime Minister, chief ministers and ministers if they are arrested and detained for 30 consecutive days on charges punishable by five years or more imprisonment. The three bills - Government of Union Territories (Amendment) Bill 2025; the Constitution (One Hundred And Thirtieth Amendment) Bill 2025; and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Amendment) Bill 2025 - were referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee.
Amit Shah strongly defended the bills stating they were aimed at upholding "constitutional morality" and public trust. The Union home minister also emphasised that the bills, would apply equally to all leaders, including those from the ruling party.
However, his assurances failed to convince the opposition. Sibal reacted sharply to Shah's remarks and claimed that "constitutional morality has nothing to do with their own morality" and has everything to do with the morality of the opposition.
"I was surprised by the home minister’s (Amit Shah) remark that the bill was introduced for morality. The home minister should stop talking about morality and tell the public if any BJP government minister has been arrested and jailed even for a day," he said.
Earlier, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had alleged that the BJP planned to use the Bills to engage in "satta chori" so that it could "topple opposition governments within 30 days" and "destabilise" democracy by using arrest as a weapon.
So, why is the opposition against the proposed legislation?
The opposition claims the proposed law can be used as a tool to bring down non-BJP governments. Sibal claimed that no minister in the BJP governments at the Centre or in states have been arrested in the last 10 years while probe agencies had targeted opposition leaders one after the another.
The former Union law minister cited the examples of AAP leaders Arvind Kejriwal, Satyendar Jain and Manish Sisodia, the Congress' P Chidambaram, D K Shivakumar and Alamgir Alam, and JMM's Hemant Soren, among others, saying they had been arrested for over a month and then got bail much later, with the trial not concluding even after years.
"No trial is complete. The home minister knows that when the PMLA and CBI get after them, nobody is granted bail. Even the Supreme Court had remarked -- why trial courts are not granting bail. And in the meantime, your political career is destroyed. The whole purpose of these laws is to weaponise laws for destabilising governments of opposition parties," Sibal alleged.
NCP (SP) leader Rohit Pawar fears the Bill would be misused to target politicians of opposition parties. "The government uses investigative agencies like the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for political vendetta rather than genuine anti-corruption efforts. There are many BJP leaders on whom we have proved corruption, but the government is doing nothing about it," the NCP(SP)leader says and adds: "98 per cent of the ED's actions are targeted against the opposition. It's no longer an independent body, it’s working on behalf of the government. It was expected to work against corruption across the board, not just the opposition," the NCP(SP) leader said.
Pending cases against non-BJP ministers and ex-chief ministers:
- Jitender Tomar of the Aam Aadmi Party was arrested in 2015, and he is still facing trial after the lapse of 10 years, he said.
- Madan Mitra of the Trinamool Congress was arrested in 2014, got bail in 2016, and is facing trial now, after 11 years.
- Nawab Malik of the Nationalist Congress Party spent 18 months in judicial custody, after his arrest in 2022, before getting bail.
- AAP leader and former Delhi Minister Satyendra Kumar Jain remained in jail for 18 months after his arrest in 2022. Jain got bail in 2024, and a closure report in the case has been filed by the CBI now.
- Former Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, spent 17 months in jail
- Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren spent five months in jail
- Former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal spent six months in jail
- Former Union minister and Congress leader P Chidambaram spent 106 days in jail in 2019.
Sibal cited these examples to slam Amit Shah’s claim of speedy justice in matters related to jailed ministers.
Is there merit in this criticism against ED?In March this year, the Union government had informed Parliament that the ED had registered 193 cases against political leaders over the past ten years. Of these, just two cases led to convictions, while no case resulted in an acquittal on merits.
https://www.thetimesofindia.online/india/only-2-convictions-in-193-ed-cases-against-politicians-in-10-years-centre/articleshow/119217677.cms
According to the data, the highest number of such cases, 32, were lodged between April 2022 and March 2023. The second highest, 27, were recorded between April 2020 and March 2021, and again between April 2023 and March 2024. Additionally, 26 cases were registered in both 2019-2020 and 2021-2022.
The government, however, denied any vendetta and said: "The financial crimes probe agency takes up cases “based on credible material and not political affiliations, religion or otherwise.”
What SC had said about EDThe Supreme Court had earlier this year made some very strong observations about the functioning of the Enforcement Directorate. The top court had reminded the central agency that it must function strictly within the bounds of the law and said: "You can’t act like a crook."
Highlighting concerns about the agency’s low conviction rate, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan had said: "You can't act like a crook, you have to act within the four corners of the law. I observed in one of my judgments that ED has registered around 5,000 ECIRs (enforcement case information report) in the past five years but the conviction rate is less than 10 per cent. We are also concerned about ED’s image. After 5–6 years of custody, if people are acquitted, who takes responsibility?”
While the government's intent of not allowing politicians to run governments from jail is indeed praiseworthy, the track record of investigative agencies, especially the ED, gives credence to opposition claims that the proposed legislation will be used to target them. What's more - the opposition claims that the BJP can use these Bills to target even its allies - Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar - in future.
(With inputs from agencies)
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