Archives for 2023

Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel is locked in a bitter battle with Governor Anusuiya Uikey over two reservation bills Chhattisgarh Public Service (SC-ST-OBC Reservation) Amendment Bill and Chhattisgarh Educational Institutions (Reservation in admission) Amendment Bill passed unanimously by the assembly. The two bills seek to provide 32% reservation for the Scheduled Tribes, 27% to Other Backward Classes, 13% to Scheduled Castes and 4% to the Economically Weaker Sections.

The governor has withheld assent to the bills and has shot off 10 questions, seeking to know the basis on which the quotas have been fixed. Baghel has accused the BJP of stalling reservation for weaker sections by using the Raj Bhavan.:

You see, initially I had thought that the governor was raising some genuine queries, which the government needed to answer. So we answered the questions. The governor has been very positive about giving due reservation to the marginalised sections. In fact, she had herself promised to approve the reservation bill without delay. But it has been stuck in the Raj Bhavan even after being passed unanimously by all members, including the MLAs belonging to the BJP. The events of the past few days have left me with no doubt that the BJP is using the Raj Bhavan to stall the reservation bill. It has a problem with our decision to raise the quota for OBC, SCs and STs. I have asked the BJP MLAs to talk to the governor for her assent. They are not doing it. It is clear that the BJP MLAs supported the bill in the assembly only because they did not want to be seen opposing it. They don’t want to press the governor for its approval. They are just making excuses. But in the eyes of the people, the BJP has been exposed as being anti-reservation.

Yes. We have given all the answers that we could. Under the Constitution, the governor has the power to ask questions. We respect that. And out of this respect, we have supplied her with all the required information. But we are getting a sense that the questions being asked by the Raj Bhavan are only a pretext to withhold the bill. The Constitution allows the governor to either approve, 
reject or hold the bill indefinitely. We will see how long it can be withheld.

Our earlier attempt to raise quota was struck down in 2019 by the high court on the ground that we did not meet the criteria. The HC wanted us to give reservation on the basis of quantifiable data. So we set up a commission. The bill we passed in the Assembly was drafted on the basis of data collected by the commission.

But you have breached the 50% ceiling fixed by the Supreme Court through the Indira Sawhney ruling.
Indira Sawhney has been breached by many states. The BJP-ruled Karnataka has 58% reservation even without getting the Act included in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution. Look at the irony, the BJP has more than 50% reservation in a state ruled by them, but here they talk of Indira Sawhney. Moreover, the Union government itself had breached the 50% ceiling when it gave reservation to the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS).

The BJP’s double game has left the state’s youth in a limbo. 
Job appointments and college admissions are all stuck.

I have done all I could to get her to pass the bill. The bill is now a property of the state legislature. The Governor has to carry out her Constitutional duty now. She has to respect the will of the legislature and do what is constitutionally right. I hope better sense will prevail.

The political fallout is huge. The BJP is completely exposed. We are having a big rally at Raipur on Tuesday to expose the BJP’s double-speak on reservation. The people of the state are watching every move of the BJP and will teach them a lesson at the right time. The BJP is playing with fire on the reservation issue.

ou see, the government employees of Chhattisgarh have been contributing to their pension scheme. This fund, totaling about Rs 17,000 crore, has been lying with the Central government. We will need to get that money back from the Centre to completely revive the old pension scheme. We will take a decision based on the choice our employees make.

New Delhi: It is “misleading and wrong” to say the Supreme Court has upheld demonetisation, the Congress declared on Monday, adding that the majority apex court verdict on the matter deals with the limited issue of the process of decision making not with its outcomes.

The verdict has nothing to say on whether the stated objectives of demonetisation were met or not, AICC general secretary Jairam Ramesh said.

The dissenting verdict on demonetisation is a “slap on the wrist” of the government as it has pointed out the “illegality and irregularities” in the decision, added his colleague and former finance minister P Chidambaram.

The Supreme Court in a 4:1 majority verdict has upheld the government’s 2016 decision to demonetise Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 denomination notes, saying the decision-making process was not flawed.

Justice B V Nagarathna dissented from the majority judgment of the Constitution bench headed by Justice S A Nazeer and said the scrapping of the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 series notes had to be done through a legislation and not through a notification.

“The majority Supreme Court verdict deals with the limited issue of the process of decision making not with its outcomes. To say that demonetisation has been upheld by the Honourable Supreme Court is totally misleading and wrong,” said Ramesh

“None of these goals – reducing currency in circulation, moving to cashless economy, curbing counterfeit currency, ending terrorism & unearthing black money-was achieved in significant measure,” he added.

Once the Supreme Court has declared the law, Chidambaram said, we are obliged to accept it.

“It may be only a slap on the wrist of the government, but a welcome slap on the wrist,” Chidambaram said in a series of tweets.

“It is necessary to point out that the majority has not upheld the wisdom of the decision; nor has the majority concluded that the stated objectives were achieved. In fact, the majority has steered clear of the question whether the objectives were achieved at all,” he said.

The dissenting judgement will rank among the famous dissents recorded in the history of the Supreme Court, the former finance minister said.

Ramesh said in a statement that the Supreme Court has only pronounced on whether Section 26(2) of RBI Act, 1934 was correctly applied or not before announcing demonetisation on November 8 2016.

“Nothing more, nothing less. One judge in her dissenting opinion has said that Parliament should not have been bypassed,” he said.

“It has said nothing on the impact of demonetisation which was a singularly disastrous decision. It damaged the growth momentum, crippled MSMEs, finished off the informal sector & destroyed lakhs and lakhs of livelihoods,” Ramesh said.

In its verdict on Monday, the court said there has to be great restraint in matters of economic policy and the court cannot supplant the wisdom of the executive by a judicial review of its decision.

The bench, also comprising Justices B R Gavai, A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian, said the Centre’s decision-making process could not have been flawed as there was consultation between the RBI and the Union government.

Ahmedabad: A 23-year-old woman was arrested for allegedly flinging her three-month-old daughter from the third floor of the civil hospital in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, resulting in the infant’s death, a police official said on Monday.

The incident took place in the medical facility in Asarwa area here in the early hours of Sunday, he added.

“Farzanabanu Malek, a resident of Petlad taluka in the state’s Anand district, has said she took this extreme step as her child Amrinbanu was ailing since birth and she could not bear to see her in so much pain,” said PP Pirojia, Additional Commissioner of Police of ‘F’ Division.

“She had, however, initially tried to mislead by claiming the child had gone missing from the hospital. But the CCTV footage of the civil hospital showed otherwise. The child was admitted there for the past two weeks,” he said.

“In the CCTV footage, she can be seen going towards the gallery carrying her daughter and then coming back empty handed. Amrin’s dead body was found by hospital staff on the ground floor. The woman has admitted to her crime,” ACP Pirojia said.

As per the FIR registered with Shahibaug police station on Sunday, the child fell ill immediately after birth and was operated at SSG Hospital in Vadodara, where she was admitted for 24 days, an official said.

The child’s father Asif has told police the doctors at Vadodara had cited consumption of contaminated water as the cause of the ailment, the official said.

As per the FIR, the child was taken to a hospital in Nadiad on December 14 after her condition deteriorated and then she was transferred to the civil hospital here as a part of her intestine had protruded from her stomach.

After being told by the accused that their daughter had gone missing from the civil hospital, Asif alerted the staff there and called police, as per the FIR.