Speaker Om Birla appoints Sanjay Jaiswal as chairperson of parliamentary committee on Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill

NEW DELHI: Three weeks after Lok Sabha decided to send the contentious Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill to a parliamentary committee for scrutiny, Speaker Om Birla Thursday named 31 members of the panel, with BJP MP Sanjay Jaiswal made chairperson. BJP-led NDA's 19 MPs will be in the committee, while Congress has favoured members from minority communities as their representatives. Opposition parties, including DMK, which has split from the INDIA bloc, have been critical of the bill and supported concerns of Christian bodies that the bill's provisions will adversely impact NGOs run by them, a contention rejected by govt, even though it agreed to send the draft law for wider scrutiny to the panel to evolve a consensus. With many parties taking time in nominating their choices, the committee's constitution was held up. It has 21 members from Lok Sabha and 10 from Rajya Sabha, and was asked to submit its report by the last day of the first week of Parliament's winter session. However, a committee's tenure is often extended to allow it to engage in consultation with different stakeholders.

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NDA's members include Bhartruhari Mahtab, Nishikant Dubey and Tejasvi Surya of BJP, Sanjay Jha of JDU, Lavu Sri Krishna of TDP and Praful Patel of NCP. Congress MPs include Anto Antony, Viriato Fernandes, Hamdullah Sayeed and Christopher Manickam. DMK's P Wilson, a lawyer and vocal critic of the bill, is also its member besides NCP-SP's Supriya Sule and TMC's Kalyan Banerjee and Menaka Guruswamy, both lawyers. Critics' main argument against the amendment bill is that it allows the executive to take control of assets of an organisation if its FCRA license is withdrawn or not renewed.

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