Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday said he is committed to having 50 per cent women at all levels of the party organisation. While he underlined that this would be a process for which a time-frame is difficult to provide, the Congress President said it was an “ideological” commitment for him along, with the stress on other wider institutional steps such as the Women’s Reservation Bill.
The Congress President, while addressing a “Mahila Adhikaar Sammelan” here, promised to extend his party’s full support to the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill, and said that if the Modi government does not table it in the Lok Sabha, the Congress would, soon after coming to power.
Gandhi said the Congress’s commitment to women’s empowerment is what distinguishes it from the ruling BJP along with other fundamental ideological differences on secularism, role of the State in upliftment of the poor through steps such as MNREGA which, he said, the “Prime Minister Narendra Modi mocks and is determined to destroy”.
He said the BJP, owing to its ideological affiliation with a patriarchal, male-chauvinistic organisation such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is “inherently anti-women” which is why crimes against women have risen sharply under the BJP’s tenure.
Attacking the PM for his silence on incidents of alleged rape, including in shelter homes in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Amethi MP asserted that what is happening against women during his tenure, “had not happened in the previous 3,000 years in India”. He alleged that Modi had remained silent over the atrocities against women in the backdrop of rapes of girls in shelter homes in Muzaffarpur in Bihar and in Uttar Pradesh.
“The Prime Minister speaks on everything — bullet train, aeroplanes, toilets, but not women. Whenever there are atrocities on women, he does not speak up,” Gandhi said.
“(He) had talked about changing India, had talked about 70 years...what they have done against women in the last four years, had not happened in the previous 3,000 years in this country, leave alone 70 years.”
“In UP women are raped, the Prime Minister does not say a word on it. In Jharkhand, and in various States, women are raped, in Bihar small girls are raped, but our Prime Minister cannot speak a word on it,” he said. In a reference to the Unnao rape case, Gandhi said that in UP “their MLA is accused of rape”, but the prime minister does not say a word.”
The Congress chief said bringing women to the forefront in the Congress was his priority and he was committed to get women framing policy, manifesto and strengthening the organisation. “We are going to create space for you in the Congress party. We need to create special space for women in our party. We need to create a space at every level.
“The RSS and the BJP will never be able to show the country a similar vision. Their parent organisation, the RSS, in its history has never allowed a woman into its organisation,” Rahul said.
“There are other organisations in the BJP that have females in it, but the RSS is a completely male chauvinist organisation that does not believe in giving space to women,” he alleged, adding that they simply “can’t do what we can do“.