Chaudhary and (above) Konwar

Patna, March 7: The standoff between the Bihar government and Governor Devanand Konwar reached a flashpoint today with Speaker Uday Narayan Chaudhary overruling Raj Bhavan’s objections to the Bihar State University (Amendment) Bill, 2010, and Patna University (Amendment) Bill, 2010, virtually making it mandatory for the governor to give his assent to them.

The governor had returned the bills on the grounds that they were money bills. But the speaker, while giving his ruling on the issue today, declared that they were normal bills and not money bills. The ruling, according to legislative experts, makes it compulsory for the governor to give his assent to the bills, which seek to curb his power in financial matters of the universities.

“The governor can return any bill. But if it is sent back for the second time he has no option but to give his assent. But the larger issue is that the state government is trying to dilute the autonomy of the universities. The government wants the vice-chancellors of the universities to be under the officials of the state government,” said legal expert Vinod Kanth.

Till late this evening, there was no reaction from Raj Bhavan on the issue.

The speaker gave his ruling on the bills during Zero Hour recalling that several NDA MLAs, including Amarendra Pratap Singh, Usha Sinha, Vinod Naryan Jha, Rameshwar Paswan and Izhar Ahmad, had objected on February 28 to the governor’s refusal to give his nod to the bills passed by both the Houses. The speaker noted that money bills were well defined under Article 199 of the Constitution. “To declare a bill a money bill on the basis that it involved withdrawal of money from treasury is not in the spirit of the Constitution,” Chaudhary said.

“Every bill involves withdrawal of government money at one stage or another during implementation,” he said, asserting that simply the involvement of the government money cannot be a criterion for defining a money bill.

Choudhary also pointed out that under Section 199(3) of the Constitution, the speaker’s decision is final in case of any dispute over the nature of a bill. Choudhary quoted the speech of first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in the Lok Sabha on May 6, 1953. Quoting Nehru, Choudhary said: “It is clear and beyond possibility of dispute that the speaker’s authority is final in declaring that a bill is a money bill. When the speaker gives his certificate to this effect, this cannot be challenged. The speaker has no obligation to consult anyone in coming to a decision or in giving his certificate.”

The standoff between the governor and the state government has resulted in ad hoc functioning of the universities of Bihar with acting vice-chancellors being appointed by Konwar, who is also the chancellor. Human resource development minister P.K. Shahi has declared in public that Raj Bhavan had refused to allot him time for making the mandatory discussion on the panel for VCs. More recently, Shahi held Konwar responsible for the anarchy in the universities.