NEW DELHI: Former Union minister and senior Congress leader P Chidambaram has claimed his party’s ownership of the Women’s Reservation Bill, ahead of debates on the bill in the new parliament.
“We will support it since we authored it,” he said, while questioning Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s intentions in introducing the bill “after 9 years of being in power”.
Chidambaram claimed that the then UPA government under Dr Manmohan Singh had authored the bill which was passed in the Rajya Sabha on 9 March, 2010. He questioned, “How did it take nine years and four months for a government which is in absolute majority in the Lok Sabha to bring back the bill and get it passed?”
The Women’s Reservation Bill has been subject to political lull for the past 26 years.
The bill had been initially introduced during former prime minister HD Deve Gowda’s time in government in 1996. During Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s time as the PM, the bill had been introduced a total of six times in the Parliament, however, it could not be passed due to opposition in the assembly. The most recent introduction of the bill was seen in 2010, when Lalu Prasad Yadav famously said that he would fight “tooth and nail” to oppose the bill to the extent of being marshalled out.
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As of now, the provisions of the tabled bill is supposed to be mostly similar to the 2010 bill, however, the implementation of it as an Act will only come about with the delimitation process post 2024 General elections.
The debate regarding the bill will see the light of day in the new parliament building which has numerous parliamentarians excited. However, unlike union minister Nitin Gadkari, who referred to the parliament as a “temple of democracy”, Chidambaram described the excitement as people “not waiting to queue to the well, rather it is a bunch of people eager to jump inside a well”.