The Bharatiya Janata Party-run government is back to bragging about its dogged efforts to expose Congress-era scams, but events in Parliament this week proved that neither party is serious about the biggest form of corruption in India: political graft.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday used the Finance Bill as a shield to pass an amendment that will prevent the Congress and the BJP from being punished for illegally accepting foreign funds.

The provision, an amendment to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, suddenly makes it legal for political parties to accept money from foreign sources. As if that weren't audacious enough from a government that has demonised non-governmental organisations for similar payments, the amendment will also have retrospective effect from September 2010.

Clean chits

Why does that matter? Because it means the provision is perfectly designed to exonerate both the Congress and the BJP, who were found guilty by the Delhi High Court of accepting money from the Vedanta group of companies in 2014.

Although a few Members of Parliament brought the matter up in the house, the matter sailed through the Lok Sabha with only the briefest of blips. This was in part because it was effectively bipartisan (the Congress had no reason to oppose a provision that lets it off the hook) – but also thanks to Jaitley's continued insistence on testing the limits of Parliamentary rules.

Last year, the Finance Minister came under attack by the Opposition for including in the Finance Bill controversial measures like a Public Debt Management Agency, which would have altered the relationship between the government and the Reserve Bank of India.

Money Bills

The Finance Bill effectively is the Budget. All of the government's financial proposals for the upcoming year are listed out in it. This is why political parties work to keep the Bill relatively controversy free, because endangering the Finance Bill is equivalent to threatening the funding of the government. But because no one wants to be accused of brinksmanship, this also means provisions within it can escape scrutiny.

Moreover, the Finance Bill is also a money bill. That is, it doesn't need to be passed by the Rajya Sabha to become the law. This means the BJP's brute majority is effectively enough to pass just about anything, as long as the Speaker can be convinced that it belongs in the Finance Bill.

Which is exactly what happened on Thursday. All India Majlis-e-Ittihadul Muslimeen chief Asaddudin Owaisi raised a point of order the day before, asking how the government could seek to amend the FCRA through the Finance Bill. Owaisi also brought up the government's use of the Finance Bill to amend the Reserve Bank of India Act, with the aim of introducing a monetary police committee.

"How can you bring an amendment to RBI or FCRA in a Finance Bill?" Owaisi said. "How can you do it? Let the Chair give a Ruling on this issue."

No but yes

Speaker Sumitra Mahajan avoided this issue last year, when there was much more vociferous push-back from the Opposition, because the government itself withdrew the controversial clauses from the Finance Bill.

This time around, Mahajan gave a ruling. She accepted that the "primary object" of a Finance Bill is to give effect to the financial proposals of the government. In fact, she even admitted that it was convention not to mess with the Finance Bill.

"The fact is that a well established practice of this House has been not to include non-taxation proposals in not only a Finance Bill but also other Bills containing taxation proposals unless it is imperative to include such proposals on constitutional or legal ground. Therefore, every effort should be made to separate taxation measures from other matters unless it is on some such unavoidable reasons to do so in a particular case."

— Sumitra Mahajan, Lok Sabha Speaker.

Yet the Speaker ruled that the rules do not specifically bar inclusion of non-taxation proposals in a Finance Bill. And so she permitted Jaitley to include amendments to the FCRA and the RBI act.

While the latter may still be defensible – since the Constitution allows money bills to undertake "the amendment of the law with respect to any financial obligations undertaken or to be undertaken by the Government of India – using the Finance Bill to change the FCRA still seems outrageous.

Abuse of power

The FCRA was itself not a money bill. It doesn't govern taxation or government spending, and its stated objective is regulating foreign contribution in the national interest, without any specific economic policy motive. It has no bearing on the "financial obligations" undertaken by the Government of India. So how can an amendment to the FCRA be included in the Finance Bill?

Despite all this, the government's abuse of its money bill privileges is only a sideshow. As with the Aadhaar Bill, using this route prevents the sort of scrutiny that might come with having to pas through the Rajya Sabha, where the BJP is in a minority.

Yet unlike the Aadhaar, the FCRA change was unlikely to have garnered much opposition even in the upper house because it makes fund raising much easier for parties. The Society for Participatory Research in India has even suggested that this policy change might open the floodgates for a wave of new political parties in India that receive foreign-source funding.

The Speaker's ruling also opens up the potential of future governments continuing to use the Finance Bill to sneak in non-financial business, now that there is precedent. All of which brings us back to the matter that has dominated this session of Parliament: If the BJP believes that AgustaWestland was a classic case of the Congress abusing power in the past, what exactly do you call this?