‘BJP Rhetoric on Women Reservation is Hollow Propaganda’
Roma, a social activist and an Advocate based in Delhi, says the BJP only gives lip service to women’s issues so as to capture their votes. Her views:
It is a dark irony that despite the rhetoric by the political class, as seen recently by the prime minister and the sundry women fronts of the BJP, the Women’s Reservation Bill has been least talked about or discussed in the country. This reflects how the establishment actually thinks and cares about women empowerment.
To be honest, even we were not aware about it until media reports reminded us that it was already passed in 2023. That is how we realised that despite being passed in Parliament, it was suddenly ushered in a Parliament session now, with no debate or discussion. Why?
To push the Delimitation Bill so as to give an eternal electoral advantage to the BJP in the backward Hindi heartland, especially UP, thereby totally denying the legitimate rights of Southern India, Punjab and Bengal, which have seen much better human development indices, and women’s empowerment in education, health, social sector, and representation in politics. Check the record of the Trinamool Congress in both the state assembly and Parliament, and in rural Bengal.
Hence, the BJP rhetoric on the Women’s Reservation Bill, including the speech by the prime minister, was basically election propaganda to woo women voters in West Bengal. Indeed, they are scared of women’s political power, especially in enlightened Bengal.
If the Delimitation bill had come through, camouflaged with the deceptive re-entry of the Women’s Reservation Bill, the entire colour and content of Parliament would have changed in the days to come. A discredited BJP, with failure writ large on all fronts, had found a back-door method to stay in power eternally.
Certainly, when women actually get tangible power and stake in governance and force its implementation on the ground, this might thereby lead to the end of an entrenched patriarchal and feudal system, not in words, but in the actual implementation of land and agrarian reforms, dismantling of archaic, anti-women norms, hike in women’s wages, domestic rights plus the dignity of labour inside homes, equal property ownership for women, and the reassertion of fundamental rights of women in every field, including in the private and public sector, and in positions of economic and political power.
Instead, they choose only to give lip service to women’s issues so as to capture their votes, since now the collective women’s vote is quite decisive. They want to continue the legacy of Manu. This suits them well.
How can we forget the Unnao rape and murder case, where the family of the survivor-fighter was targeted, and she was relentlessly hounded? Didn’t the former BJP MLA get bail recently?
Have we forgotten Hathras and Kathua rapes and murders, the sexual harassment of women wrestlers at the hands of a BJP bahubali, and the protracted struggle of our world champion women wrestlers, the Bilquis Bano gang rape and her family’s murder, including that of her little child, and the garlanding of the murderers and rapists in Gujarat! The simmering wounds of the Ankita Bhandari murder case are still fresh in our memory.
This is the list of known atrocities on women; many cases are still unknown like the hidden names in the Epstein files. The rapes in Manipur in broad dalight, the stripping of Kuki women by men of the other community, the multiple cases during the Gujarat genocide, etc. Now the BJP is screaming for women’s empowerment – it is really a sorry scenario, and the darkest irony.
The narrator is general secretary of the All India Union of Forest Working People (AIUFWP)
As told to Amit Sengupta
