Sonia Gandhi talks of women's empowerment, praises opponents

NEW DELHI: Even as the Congress-led UPA Government faced Opposition ire over cash-forvotes scandal in Parliament, party president Sonia Gandhi spoke in glowing terms about Leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj and BSP chief Mayawati in a lecture on ‘ Women as Agents of Change.’ Delivering the 14th Commonwealth lecture on the subject in London on Thursday, Gandhi talked at length about women’s issues in India and how they have gradually been empowered through education, right to vote and other progressive steps.

Without naming Swaraj or Mayawati, Gandhi heaped praise on them and spoke about them as women achievers. “A visitor to contemporary India will be impressed by the prominence of women in all aspects of life. India’s President (Pratibha Patil) is a woman, as are the Speaker (Meira Kumar) and the Leader of the Opposition in the Lower House of Parliament (Swaraj).” Though Congress and the party’s heirapparent Rahul Gandhi have been taking on Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, Gandhi spoke about her hailing from a weaker section of society and how she is at the helm of affairs of a large state.

“The Chief Minister of India’s most populous state is a woman from a section of society subjected to discrimination for centuries. Women are presidents of four of our major political parties,” (Mayawati of BSP, Mamata Banerjee of Trinamool Congress, Jayalalithaa of AIADMK and herself) Gandhi said. The Congress president, however, expressed her disappointment over low level of women’s participation in national politics.

A year after Congress-led UPA Government managed to get the Women’s Reservation Bill passed in the Rajya Sabha, she repeated that the Government would make all efforts to get the legislation passed in the Lok Sabha too. Speaking about the amendment to the Constitution which provided 33% reservation for women in rural and urban local bodies, Gandhi said, “Today, 1.2 million elected women representatives, including women from the most deprived and disadvantaged communities, have taken their place alongside men in the councils of rural self-government ... But I am less than happy to admit that at the national level we have not yet been successful.”

She said women’s representation in Parliament has hovered between 9 and 11%, “a figure that is considerably lower than in many other democracies” . Speaking about pushing the Women’s Reservation Bill through Lok Sabha, Gandhi said, “legislation for a 33% quota in Parliament and state assemblies has been passed by the Upper House. We shall persevere in our efforts to get it approved by the Lower House as well.”