The winter session of Parliament will run from November 25 to December 20

New Delhi: The winter session of Parliament will be held from November 25 to December 20, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said in a post on Tuesday afternoon.

A special event to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution – November 26, or Constitution Day – will be held in the Central Hall on the second day of the session.

This will be the first Parliament after four state elections, including the first in a decade in Jammu and Kashmir, in which the BJP fell behind the National Conference-Congress alliance. However, the BJP took some revenge by winning a historic third consecutive term in Haryana.

The third and fourth elections in Maharashtra, where the BJP is in alliance with Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena faction and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP faction, and Jharkhand, where Hemant Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, a member of the Congress-led India Bloc, is in power, will be held next week.

Among the major bills that are likely to be debated or discussed include the controversial amendments to the Waqf Bill and provisions of the government’s ambitious ‘one nation, one election’ proposal.

The amendments to the Wakf Bill are currently being studied by a joint parliamentary committee headed by Jagdambika Pal of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The committee is to submit its report to Parliament by November 29.

However, the functioning of the JPC has been mired in controversy after opposition MPs wrote to the Lok Sabha Speaker this week warning that they may ‘dissociate’ themselves from the panel.

The MPs accused Mr Pal of taking decisions unilaterally about meeting dates and calling for consultations and called his actions “a coercive way to subdue (protests) and pass changes”. Last month, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had indicated that the bill could be introduced and passed in the next sitting of Parliament (citing the winter session). As far as the ‘one nation, one election’ proposal is concerned, a committee headed by former President Ram Nath Kovind had cleared the way forward in March, submitting a report that proposed holding simultaneous Lok Sabha and assembly elections in the first phase. The ‘one nation, one election’ proposal was part of the BJP’s manifesto in 2019 but has been strongly criticised by the Opposition, who have red-flagged constitutional issues. In the last Parliament session, the monsoon session, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget and MPs discussed various issues, including the landslide in Wayanad, Kerala.