The CPI(M) on Sunday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of not fulfilling his promise to provide 33 per cent quota for women in elected bodies and demanded immediate passage of the legislation. “Before the lok Sabha election, the Prime Minister had promised the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill. Now the Government should ensure its passage,” CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury said after an all-party meeting here.
The Women’s Reservation Bill or the Constitution (108th Amendment) Bill, 2008, had sought to reserve one-third of all seats in the lok Sabha and legislative assemblies for women. The Rajya Sabha had passed the bill in March 2010. But it could not be cleared by the lok Sabha and had subsequently lapsed.
Similar bills were introduced thrice in the late 1990s but lapsed with the dissolution of their respective lok Sabha. A Joint Parliamentary Committee chaired by CPI leader Geeta Mukherjee had examined the 1996 bill and made seven recommendations, five of which were included in the bill tabled in the Rajya Sabha in 2008.
Introduced by the UPA-I Government in May 2008, the bill had also proposed that one third of the total seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes shall be reserved for women belonging to those communities.
Yechury said there were 16 bills listed by the Government in what was perhaps going to be the shortest Monsoon session. The session which starts on Monday ends on August 11. “Every day, the country is witnessing an incident of cow vigilantism and so many innocents are killed in the name of cows. This issue needs to be discussed and the Government should answer,” Yechury stressed.