New Delhi, March 21: Like David taking on Goliath, RSP Lok Sabha MP N.K. Premachandran today launched a broadside on the government for slipping amendments to 40 laws into the Finance Bill with practically no notice to members and writing off the Rajya Sabha's right to vote on them.

A supplementary list of amendments was circulated in the Lok Sabha just before the start of the post-lunch session. "I got the amendments just two minutes before the House met," Premachandran told The Telegraph after the proceedings concluded.

He described today's list of amendments as "backdoor legislation" and linked them to the government's new sense of empowerment following the ruling BJP's landslide win in Uttar Pradesh. He said so on the floor of the House, adding that at this rate, the remaining sessions of Parliament could be done away with.

"When the original (Finance) Bill was presented on February 1, 2017, that is before the UP election, only eight to 10 acts were proposed to be amended and those included the Reserve Bank of India Act as well as the Representation of the People Act. Now various other amendments have been proposed," Premachandran said.

The eleventh hour amendments included changes in the Companies Act, the Employees Provident Fund and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, the Industrial Disputes Act, the Copyright Act, the Trade Marks Act, the Railway Claims Tribunal Act and the Railways Act.

Premachandran had a specific question for Speaker Sumitra Mahajan: Can Rule 80(i) of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in the Lok Sabha be suspended to allow the amendments to be "pushed through''.

To cement his case, Premachandran cited not only the first Lok Sabha Speaker G.V. Mavalankar on the matter but also Mahajan's own ruling of April 30, 2015, under which she had got finance minister Arun Jaitley to drop some "non-taxation provisions like those relating to a Public Debt Management Agency and Senior Citizens' Welfare Fund" from the Finance Bill.

Premachandran showered a bit of praise on Mahajan, describing her decision as better than the one by Mavalankar in 1956 - but to no avail.

Nor did his burst of outrage help. "Madam, if you are going to transact the legislative business of this House in such a way, there is no need for a monsoon session, there is no need of a winter session because then, legislation in the country can be brought within the purview of the Finance Bill so that discussion can be curtailed, so that scrutiny by standing committees can be curtailed, and so that scrupulous scrutiny of the bill, clause-by-clause, cannot be done," Premachandran said.

While he found support from the Trinamul Congress and the Congress, the Opposition in the Lok Sabha is hugely outnumbered, allowing the government a free run. In any case, as former Lok Sabha secretary-general Subhash C. Kashyap said, the Speaker's ruling on what constitutes a money bill is final. A money bill can be introduced, amended and voted on only in the Lok Sabha. They are referred to the Rajya Sabha but it cannot vote on them.

The Opposition in both Houses has been up in arms over the past two years over the frequent use of the money bill route to avoid a vote in the Rajya Sabha where the government is still short of numbers.

Asked about today's developments in the Lok Sabha, CPM leader in the Rajya Sabha, Sitaram Yechury, said: "This is a subversion of the Constitution to bypass the Rajya Sabha as the Finance Bill is a money bill. This exposes the government's anti-democratic methods."