BJP’s Jagdambika Pal appointed chairperson of joint panel on Waqf bill; See full list of members | India News

NEW DELHI: Jagdambika Pal, a senior BJP Lok Sabha member, has been appointed the chairperson of the joint committee of Parliament that will examine the contentious Waqf (Amendment) Bill, according to a Lok Sabha notification issued on Tuesday.
The official notification said Speaker Om Birla named Pal the head of the 31-member committee.
The government decided to refer the bill to a joint committee of both houses following protests by the opposition in the Lok Sabha regarding its provisions.The joint panel consists of 31 members, with 21 from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha, and is expected to submit its report by the next session.
The 21 members of the committee from the Lower House are Jagdambika Pal, Nishikant Dubey, Tejasvi Surya, Aparajita Sarangi, Sanjay Jaiswal, Dilip Saikia, Abhijit Gangopadhyay, D K Aruna, Gaurav Gogoi, Imran Masood, Mohammad Jawed, Mohibbullah, Kalyan Banerjee, A Raja, Lavu Sri Krishna Devarayalu, Dileshwar Kamait, Arvind Samant, Mahtre Balya Mama Suresh Gopinath, Naresh Ganpat Mhaske, Arun Bharti and Asaduddin Owaisi.

Brij Lal, Medha Vishram Kulkarni, Gulam Ali, Radha Mohan Das Agrawal, Syed Naseer Hussain, Mohammed Nadimul Haque, Y Vijayasal Reddy, M Mohamed Abdulla, Sanjay Singh and Dharmasthala Veerendra Heggade are the members of the committee from the Rajya Sabha.
The Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha adopted a motion moved by union minority affairs minister Kiren Rijiju on Friday last, naming the members to be part of the committee.
In the Lower House, the panel includes 12 members from the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), with eight from the BJP, and nine from the opposition.
In the Upper House, four members are from the BJP, four from the opposition, one from the YSRCP, which has opposed the Bill, and one is a nominated member.
The Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha last Thursday and referred to a joint committee of Parliament following a heated debate.
The government asserted that the proposed law did not intend to interfere with the functioning of mosques, while the opposition called it a targeting of Muslims and an attack on the Constitution. The committee has been tasked with submitting its report to the Lok Sabha by the last day of the first week of the next session, as said by Rijiju.