Rajya Sabha MP from the Trinamool Congress Derek O’Brien said on Saturday that his party and the Samajwadi Party will not nominate any members to the proposed joint committee of Parliament set up to examine three bills that bar ministers, chief ministers or the prime minister from holding office if they are arrested.

The Samajwadi Party, however, has not released any official statement on the matter.

The three bills – the Constitution 130th Amendment Bill, the Jammu & Kashmir Reorganisation Amendment Bill and the Government of Union Territories Amendment Bill – propose that a sitting minister, chief minister or even the prime minister can lose their position within a month if they are arrested or detained for 30 consecutive days over an offence that carries a jail term of five years or more.

The bills were tabled in the Lok Sabha on August 20 amid protests by the Opposition. The Opposition parties have described them as “draconian” and “squarely destructive”.

The bills have been referred to a 31-member Joint Committee of Parliament, comprising 21 members from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha.

In a blogpost on Saturday, O’Brien also called the proposed committee a “farce”.

He said that joint parliamentary committees were originally conceived as “democratic and well-intentioned mechanisms”, created through motions passed by both Houses of Parliament.

Such committees were vested with exceptional powers such as summoning witnesses, demanding documents and examining experts, beyond the scope of ordinary committees, to ensure transparency and public accountability, he added.

O’Brien said that this has changed since 2014 with joint parliamentary committees being manipulated by the government in power.

“Now, in the same committee which represents public accountability, procedures are bypassed, opposition amendments rejected, and meaningful debate replaced by partisan fluff,” he added.

“The [Narendra] Modi coalition pushing to form this [joint parliamentary committee] to examine an ‘unconstitutional bill’ is a stunt performed to create a distraction from special intensive revision,” he said. “Someone needed to call a stunt a stunt. I am glad we did.”

The special intensive revision of voter rolls is underway in Bihar. As part of the exercise, persons whose names were not on the 2003 voter list will need to submit proof of eligibility to vote.

Several Opposition parties have raised concerns that the exercise could risk disenfranchising many voters, as they may not be able to produce the necessary documents.

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