• Smt. Sonia Gandhi, Chairperson, CPP

The Prime Minister is making appeals to Opposition parties to support Bills that the government wants to bulldoze in a special session of Parliament when the election campaign in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal will be at its peak. There can be only one reason for the extraordinary hurry, which is to derive political advantage and place the Opposition on the defensive. The Prime Minister is, as usual, being economical with the truth.

The Parliament passed the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, 2023, unanimously in September 2023 during a special session. The Adhiniyam introduced Article 334-A in the Constitution which mandated one-third reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabhas, scheduled to come into effect after the completion of the next Census and the Census-based delimitation process. The Opposition had not asked for this condition. In fact, the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Shri Mallikarjun Kharge, had forcefully demanded that the reservation provision be implemented from the 2024 Lok Sabha elections itself. For reasons best known to itself, the government did not agree.

Now, we are given to understand that Article 334-A will be amended to make women’s reservation applicable from 2029 itself. Why did it take the Prime Minister 30 months to make his U-turn? And why can he not wait a few weeks to convene the special session? Opposition leaders have written to the government not once but thrice requesting that an All-Party meeting be convened after the last phase of elections is over in West Bengal on April 29, to discuss what the new proposals of the government are. But that perfectly reasonable request has been turned down. Instead, the Prime Minister has resorted to writing op-eds, making appeals to political parties, and organizing sammelans. It is an underhand tactic that reflects the Prime Minister’s one-upmanship and his ‘my way or the highway’ approach to decision-making.

Lessons from the past

Contrast this with the manner in which the 73rd and 74th Constitution Amendment Bills were finally passed by Parliament in April 1993 and June 1993, respectively. The Bills took almost five years of discussion and debate, following which reservation for women in elections to panchayats and nagarpalikas became law. This was a singular achievement of the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Today, there are about 15 lakh elected women representatives in rural and urban local bodies, constituting over 40% of the total. The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, 2023, stands on the shoulders of this achievement.

The last decadal Census was due in 2021. The Modi government kept postponing it. One consequence of this has been that over 10 crore people have been deprived of their legal entitlements under the National Food Security Act, 2013, that provides the basis for the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana. Census operations have begun only after an inexplicable delay of five years. It is being proudly claimed that it is a digital Census. Senior official have themselves publicly declared that because of its digital nature, most of the population enumeration numbers will be available in 2027 itself. The government’s excuses for its tearing hurry to call this session and conduct delimitation are evidently hollow.

Almost exactly a year ago, the Prime Minister announced that the 2027 Census would also be a caste census. This was after filing affidavits in the Supreme Court and answering questions in Parliament rejecting the idea of conducting a caste census. This was also after the Prime Minister accused Congress leaders calling for a caste census as suffering from what he called “an urban naxal mindset”. Be that as it may, Census 2027 is supposed to enumerate the population by caste in order to give greater meaning to social justice and empowerment. Bihar and Telangana have carried out comprehensive caste surveys in their respective States, with the whole process not taking more than six months.

It is clear, therefore, that the propaganda that a caste census will delay the publication of the Census 2027 is just not true. In fact, the Prime Minister’s real intention now is to further delay and derail the caste census.

The special session is scheduled to begin on April 16. Yet till now, there has been no official proposal shared with MPs on what exactly the government wants the session to consider. It appears that some formula for delimitation is being suggested. Any delimitation must be preceded by a Census exercise as in the past. And it goes without saying that any delimitation involving an increase in the strength of the Lok Sabha must be politically — and not just arithmetically — equitable. States that have been pioneers in family planning, and smaller States, must not be placed at an absolute or relative disadvantage.

A proportionate increase may, in fact, result in the loss of relative influence because the difference in absolute numbers get magnified.

Need for careful consideration

The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, 2023, provides for reservation within reservation. This means that the one-third of seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes respectively will also be reserved for women.

During the debate in September 2023, the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha had demanded that a similar reservation be also provided for women belonging to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Reservation for OBCs has been already provided for in higher education and government employment.

The monsoon session of Parliament will begin in mid-July. The heavens will not fall if the government were to call an All-Party meeting after April 29, to discuss its proposals with the Opposition, allowing time for a public debate, and then have the Constitution Amendment Bills considered in the monsoon session. There is simply no justification, except narrative management during troubled times, for this tearing hurry to bulldoze extremely far-reaching changes to our polity. The process is deeply flawed and anti-democratic. Reservation for women is not the issue here. That has already been settled. The real issue is delimitation which, based on the information unofficially available, is extremely dangerous and an assault on the Constitution itself.

Courtesy: The Hindu