New Delhi: Congress on Tuesday charged Prime Minister Narendra Modi with dragging his feet on women’s legislative reservation by conditioning it on delimitation, spotlighting prior appeals from Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi for prompt enactment.
Reviving 2018 Rahul Gandhi Appeal
Congress communications in-charge Jairam Ramesh highlighted a letter from Rahul Gandhi, Congress president at the time, dated July 16, 2018, pressing the Prime Minister for immediate women’s reservation rollout.
“Eight years later, the Prime Minister – keen to delay the implementation of reservations by linking it to delimitation – is still to act on this demand,” Ramesh remarked.
He circulated Gandhi’s 2018 missive to Modi, which sought backing to advance the Women’s Reservation Bill in Parliament’s impending monsoon session, as reported by The New Indian Express.
“As you are aware, the Women’s Reservation Bill, passed by the Rajya Sabha on the 9th of March, 2010, has been stalled on one pretext or the other, in the Lok Sabha, for over eight years now.
When this bill was passed in the Rajya Sabha with the support of the BJP, the then leader of the opposition, Arun Jaitley ji, called the passage of the bill ‘historic and momentous’.
Since then, while the Congress party has been unwavering in its commitment to the bill, the BJP appears to have had second thoughts, even though this was one of its key promises in its 2014 manifesto,” Gandhi had said.
“Mr. Prime Minister, in many of your public rallies you have spoken about your passion for empowering women and involving them more meaningfully in public life.
What better way to demonstrate your commitment to the cause of women, than by offering your unconditional support to the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill? And what better time, than the upcoming session of Parliament? Any further delay will make it impossible to implement before the next general elections,” Gandhi added.
“On the issue of empowering our women, let us stand together, rise above party politics and send India a message that we believe the time for change has come.
Women must take their rightful place in our state legislatures and in Parliament, where they are at present abysmally represented,” he concluded.
Sonia Gandhi’s 2017 Push and Broader Context
Ramesh further shared Sonia Gandhi’s 2017 letter as Congress president, imploring Modi to secure Lok Sabha passage of the bill.
“You may recall that it was, in fact, the Congress Party and its late leader Shri Rajiv Gandhi who first mooted the provision for reservation for women in panchayats and nagarpalikas in the Constitution Amendment Bills which the Opposition parties thwarted in the Rajya Sabha in 1989 but later were passed by both Houses of Parliament in 1993 becoming the 73rd and 74th Amendments,” Sonia Gandhi stated in her letter.
Ramesh emphasized, “The Congress Party’s stance has been unflinching and unchanged. It is the Modi Government that slept on this demand and has then tried to delay it by linking it to delimitation.”
The remarks follow Congress’s Monday assertion that rejecting the Modi administration’s delimitation-linked women’s quota bid exposed “bulldozer politics,” framing the Centre’s true aim as Prime Minister Modi’s “preservation” rather than empowerment.
The party reiterated calls for enacting the quota on the present Lok Sabha configuration through legislation in the Monsoon session of Parliament or by late May.
These claims arise shortly after the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill — designed to boost Lok Sabha seats to 816 from 543 via 2011 Census-based delimitation, enabling 33% women’s reservation pre-2029 elections — lapsed in the Lok Sabha on Friday.
