JPC chairperson and BJP MP Jagdambika Pal

NEW DELHI: With opposition MPs “boycotting” the scheduled study tour of members of the joint parliamentary committee on the Waqf Bill, the LS Secretariat has postponed the trips to Kolkata, Patna and Lucknow from Nov 12 to Nov 14, with a notification being issued on Monday.
The secretariat decided to defer the meetings at the three cities after those at Guwahati and Bhubaneswar were washed out as just five (all from BJP) of the 31 members of the panel attended them — the meetings had failed to garner the required quorum.
The panel’s opposition members had earlier met LS Speaker Om Birla and requested him to postpone the tours planned between Nov 9 and Nov 14 as MPs were visiting their constituencies.
On Saturday, some opposition MPs had written to Birla, expressing dismay that despite their meeting with him over the panel’s functioning , JPC chairperson and BJP MP Jagdambika Pal had gone ahead with the state tours according to the schedule that he had set.
After the tours were postponed, TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee on Monday said, “We had requested for deferment of the tours, as we were caught up with elections in many of states. Also, most often, JPC meetings in Delhi have few members from the governing side attending, hence with opposition members staying away, we had warned of lack of quorum at the meetings. However, finally good sense seems to have prevailed, and it is welcome.”
In their letter to the speaker, the members had said, “To our utter surprise, we found that the tour commencing from Nov 9 has not been deferred. In such view of the matter, we thought it prudent to boycott the said tour.”
The members announced their decision at a press conference in Kolkata, which was held by Banerjee. In their letter to Birla, they had said they would make their decision public. Banerjee, DMK’s A Raja and Congress’s Mohammad Jawed were among those who wrote to the speaker.
Following claims by the opposition MPs that tour meetings being led by Pal lacked quorum, JPC chairman Jagdambika Pal on Sunday refuted the charge saying “study tours” of parliamentary panels are an informal exercise and are not bound by formalities like meeting the quorum.