A day after the government introduced a constitutional amendment bill reserving 33 per cent of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, the bill will be taken up for discussion on Wednesday when the House will meet at 11 am.
Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi is likely to open the debate for Congress. When asked about the bill on Tuesday, the Congress leader claimed credit for it, stating "It's ours."
Incidentally, Gandhi will be speaking in the Lok Sabha after a year.
The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam bill, the first bill to be introduced in the new Parliament building, was tabled in the Lower House by Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his first speech in the first session in the new premises that the government wanted more and more women to join the development process of the country. "For many years, there have been several debates and controversies around women's reservation. On women's reservation, there have been many efforts earlier also in Parliament. In 1996, the first bill related to this was introduced. During Atal Bihari Vajpayee's tenure, many times the women's reservation bill was brought but numbers could not be mustered for it and the dream was left unfulfilled," he said.
Modi also urged opposition members of both Houses to pass the bill unanimously.
However, the bill will come into effect only after a delimitation exercise is completed. It is therefore unlikely to be in force during the next Lok Sabha elections in 2024. This has triggered controversy after Congress claimed it "an election jumla".
Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh described the bill as a huge betrayal of the hopes of crores of Indian women and girls". "As we had pointed out earlier, the Modi government has not yet conducted the 2021 Decadal Census making India the only country in G20 that has failed to carry out the Census When will this Census take place?" Ramesh said.
Rajya Sabha MP and former Union minister, Kapil Sibal, also raised questions over the implementation of the proposed law, saying that any such Bill or draft legislation can only become law after a census and delimitation exercise. "They are merely trying to extract political mileage from the tabling of this draft legislation going into the Lok Sabha elections next year. They want to tell the people, especially women that they brought this landmark law into force. They should have done it in 2014. What is so historic about it? There has to be a census and delimitation before the women’s reservation Bill is implemented. What if census and delimitation don’t happen?” Sibal said.
