THE last day of the monsoon session of the Parliament came to surprise and shock the people and their representatives. Amidst a session which had been extremely stormy over the charges of large scale manipulation of people’s basic right to vote, late in the evening the Home Minister Amit Shah, introduced a Constitution Amendment Bill. The Constitution (130th Amendment) Bill, 2025, had certain general formulations, as well as, to the specific situation obtaining in union territories.
Elsewhere in this issue, the constitutional and the legal questions arising from the amendment are dealt with in detail. But, it is important to scrutinise the politics which has gone into the authoring of the bill. It is more so because, any citizen who has gone through the procedure for the enactment of a Constitution Amendment even with a little avidity, will find this exercise outrageous. For the passage of a Constitution Amendment, the ruling dispensation would require a two-thirds majority of more than half the members attending in each of the two houses of Parliament. With a basic knowledge of simple arithmetic regarding the present composition of the two houses, one can conclusively see that the passage of the bill is well neigh impossible.
The natural question to ask would be, why then the tearing hurry to push a legislation which can never be passed? The government has provided its own answer. They claim that it is to bring in better defence of ‘public interest, welfare and good governance’. It becomes really bizarre when this claim is raised to the level of restoration of ‘constitutional morality’.
The compulsion for examining such lofty claims on the basis of the government’s record on these counts becomes imperative. In the past, this very government had enacted an amendment to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), which in effect weaponised the Enforcement Directorate (ED). The ED was armed to deny bail as a matter of practice to those who are charged under this new amendment. Since the passage of this new avatar of the PMLA, the country has witnessed more often than not, important opposition leaders, including chief ministers, under the provisions of the law and they have been kept behind bars for more than six months. The chief ministers – Arvind Kejriwal of Delhi and Hemant Soren of Jharkhand – were later absolved of these charges by the concerned High Courts. If the proposed 130th Constitution Amendment would have been in force, these two people would definitely have lost their office.
But, leave aside unrelenting opposition chief ministers who refuse to be cowed down by the government, the government could have their way in browbeating opposition leaders, MPs and MLAs to surrender and walk over to the BJP. In April 2024, the Indian Express front-paged a report detailing out the methodology and listing out more than two dozens of such erstwhile opposition members – from Suvendhu Adhikari, the former minister of Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, who has now become the leader of the opposition of BJP to Ashok Chavan, former chief minister of Maharashtra from Congress and the present blue-eyed boy of the BJP top brass Hemanta Biswa Sarma, the current chief minister of Assam – who left for the greener pastures of the ruling party. All of them were slapped with charges by the ED and once they crossed over, they were promptly given the clean chit.
The worst case example of this obnoxious methodology was played out in Maharashtra where the Uddhav Thackeray led Maha Vikas Aghadi government was dislodged by splitting both the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party. The act was so brazen that it transpired that nine of the cabinet ministers of the new government headed by Eknath Shinde, a turncoat from Shiv Sena, had been charged by the ED. It goes without saying that subsequent sanitisation of these individuals have earned the BJP the unsavoury adjective of being a ‘washing machine’. Therefore, today when Amit Shah tries to sound saintly, by claiming that the proposed amendment is not about politics or election, even people from his own party would privately laugh at such absurd claims!
BJP’s biggest expose on corruption is now well recorded, with the Supreme Court declaring the Electoral Bonds (EB) scheme as unconstitutional. The EB scheme was the most blatant act to forge a quid pro quo between the BJP and a section of the corporates. In fact, the details of donations received by the BJP under the scheme clearly outline the kind of illegal transactions which enabled BJP with a coffer of more than Rs 5,000 crores. Further media investigation has also revealed that the manner of accessing such huge funds was facilitated by ED and CBI, making the EB scheme an outright extortion as distinct from voluntary donations.
But who can remind Amit Shah that public memory is not so short and his reference to constitutional morality cannot ever be digested. The home minister can go to any length in clearly committing a contempt on the Supreme Court order to accuse Justice Sudarshan Reddy for the sake of winning the vice president election, which in the first place has arisen because of whatever they have done to former vice president Jagdeep Dhankhar.
The principal instrument to fight corruption is to infuse transparency in governance. The legal wranglings over denial of the prime minister’s academic records is perhaps the worst advertisement for the government’s penchant for opacity! Without any prejudice to the content of his academic record, will this act in itself raise the moral standard of the PM or his government in the public eye?
Given this horrific record of the government, nobody is going to buy the stated objectives of the Constitution (130th Amendment) Bill, 2025. The question will continue to haunt as to why this desperation in pushing this obnoxious amendment. Growing sections of the people see this as an effort to deflect attention from the mounting evidence of subversion of the constitutional body – the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Constitution itself, to do away with the constitutional right of the people to vote, for the sake of securing the electoral interests of the BJP.
(August 27, 2025)
