CJI agrees to list Money Bills reference

Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud on Monday agreed to list petitions challenging the Money Bill route taken by the Centre to pass contentious amendments in the Parliament.

“I will list when I form Constitution Benches,” the Chief Justice addressed senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who made an oral mentioning on behalf of petitioners, including Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh.

The Money Bill question was referred to a seven-judge Bench in November 2019 by a five-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi in the case of Rojer Mathew vs. South Indian Bank Ltd.

The cardinal issue is whether such amendments could be passed as a Money Bill, circumventing the Rajya Sabha, in violation of Article 110 of the Constitution.

A Money Bill is deemed to contain only provisions dealing with all or any of the matters under clauses (a) to (g) of Article 110(1), largely including the appropriation of money from the Consolidated Fund of India and taxation. In other words, a Money Bill is restricted only to the specified financial matters.

The reference includes legal questions concerning amendments made from 2015 onwards in the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) through Money Bills, giving the Enforcement Directorate almost blanket powers of arrest, raids, etc.

Though the court had upheld the legality of the PMLA amendments, it left the question whether the amendments could have been passed as Money Bills to the seven-judge Bench.

Questions abound

Similarly, the case also raises questions about passage of the Finance Act of 2017 as a Money Bill to alter the appointments to 19 key judicial tribunals, including the National Green Tribunal and Central Administrative Tribunal.

Ramesh, a petitioner in this case, had argued that the 2017 Act was deliberately categorised as a Money Bill to “extend executive control over these institutions (tribunals) by altering the composition of the selection committees and vastly downgrading the qualifications and experience required to staff these bodies”.

The question of passage of laws after dressing them up as Money Bills had come up in the Aadhaar case too. However, the apex court had, in a majority verdict in 2021, refused to review its 2018 judgment (K Puttaswamy case) upholding the validity of the Aadhaar Act and its certification as a Money Bill.

Dissenting opinion

Justice Chandrachud (as he was then) had delivered a dissenting opinion on the Review Bench in 2021. The two questions before the Review Bench had been whether the Lok Sabha Speaker’s decision to declare the proposed Aadhaar law as Money Bill was “final”.

The second, whether the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 was correctly certified as a ‘Money Bill’ under Article 110(1) of the Constitution.

Justice Chandrachud, in his dissent, had said the Review Bench ought to wait till the seven-judge Bench decided the larger questions on Money Bill in the Rojer Mathew reference. But the majority, led by Justice (retired) AM Khanwilkar, had disagreed with him.