Kamal Ghorui
NEW DELHI: Mocking BJP for turning “nari” into “nara” (slogan), SP chief Akhilesh Yadav said the party was rushing with women’s quota on the basis of Census 2011 because it wanted to delay the caste census, which would lead to the demand for an OBC subquota.Manish Tewari of Congress warned that delimitation had a constitutional safeguard but govt wanted to arrogate to itself the power to cherry-pick the census conducted from 1951 to 2011. Tewari also wondered “what would happen” when the strength of Lok Sabha was raised to 850 if functioning with 543 members was difficult.Akhilesh said, “The rights of backwards are being usurped.” He demanded that the women’s quota include a quota for OBC and Muslim women. He said PM Narendra Modi called himself an OBC for votes but was silent on reservation for them.TMC’s Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar questioned the “haste” on the quota bill, calling it a cover to alter the electoral process and harm democracy. She expressed concerns that the proposed delimitation commission would be “authoritarian just like EC”.NCP’s Amol Kolhe said his party supported the quota bill but opposed delimitation.Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi of NC cited the delimitation in J&K that he said was done to help BJP. He said other states would now feel J&K’s pain.Shiv Sena’s Arvind Sawant accused BJP of hurting federal structure. Abhay Sinha of RJD demanded a subquota for OBC women even if the quota had to be raised to 50%. ET Mohammed Basheer of IUML, K Subbarayan of CPI, Malvinder Kang of AAP, Joba Majhi of JMM, Rajaram Singh of CPI (ML) and Asaduddin Owaisi of AIMIM also criticised govt.
