Backing the bill’s intentions, the council members have said that the law is intended not to blame the majority community in case of attacks on a ‘non-dominant group’ but to ensure that the administration works impartially.
They said communal and targeted violence spreads mainly when the public officials charged with protecting and preventing such instances either fail to act or do so in a biased manner.
The UPA’s official think tank, led by Congress president Sonia Gandhi, had come under attack from the BJP and other right of Centre political parties for churning out a minority-appeasing Bill. "This draft Bill proceeds on a presumption that communal trouble is created only by members of the majority community and never by a member of the minority community," Arun Jaitely, Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha had said earlier.
The council members have countered such allegations claiming the Bill was not blaming any community for the violence but only ensuring that the command systems in the state work without bias when communal incidents take place. They have said the Bill ensures that acts of both omission and commission come under its purview because very often it is the inaction of the state that leads to the violence spiraling.
The Bill does not classify or assume any particular group to be the perpetrator of communal and targeted violence, the NAC members have reaffirmed.
They have explained that the Bill is only concerned with ensuring that when the group under attack is `non-dominant’ in that state, then the officers of the state machinery must not be allowed to work in a biased manner.
The strong defence by the NAC of the basic principles behind the Bill though is tempered by the openness by the council to review specific clauses that fall foul of the constitutional balance between the Centre and state.
NAC has made a case for the Bill, noting that ‘minority’ as per the draft, could vary from region to region or state to state. Tamils as a linguistic minority in Karnataka, Biharis as a linguistic minority in Maharashtra, Muslims as a religious minority in Gujarat and Christians as a religious minority in Orissa, and dalits and tribals in several regions, the NAC members have pointed, would come under the safety net of the Bill in case of communal and targeted violence.