The Opposition parties, on Thursday, said the true intent of the bills brought by the government under the garb of implementing the women’s quota law is “mischievous” and it must be rejected in the present form. After a meeting of the India bloc leaders ahead of Parliament proceedings, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said the Opposition will not allow Parliament to be hijacked by flawed delimitation bills disguised as women’s reservation.
Besides Kharge, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, Congress general secretaries KC Venugopal and Jairam Ramesh, NCP(SP)’s Supriya Sule, DMK’s TR Baalu, TMC’s Sagarika Ghose, CPI(M)’s John Brittas, RSP’s NK Premchandaran, among others, attended the meeting in Kharge’s chamber in Parliament House complex.
In a stinging attack, Congress’s Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said the government began finishing off democracy by putting pressure on institutions, such as the Election Commission of India (EC) and the judiciary. Still, now, an “open attack” has been launched on democracy with the Constitution amendment bill. Participating in a debate in the Lok Sabha, Priyanka asked why the government can’t give 33 per cent reservation to women across the current 543 Lok Sabha seats.
She said the bill talks of increasing the number of Lok Sabha seats to up to 850 — to be done by a delimitation commission based on the 2011 Census data.
She said it was Rajiv Gandhi, as prime minister, who brought a bill for women’s reservation in panchayats and nagarpalikas, and that the bill was finally passed during the PV Narasimha Rao government of the Congress.