Women’s Bill: Siddaramaiah demands OBC quota within women quota for social equality

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Wednesday warned the BJP that the larger purpose of the women’s reservation bill would fail if it did not provide for a horizontal quota for women from backward communities, seeking to give an OBC spin to the proposed law that has been hailed by all political parties.

The backward class women will continue to suffer injustice if an internal quota is not provided, the CM said in a media statement.

Siddaramaiah, a backward class leader himself, rode to power on the back of a movement he led championing the cause of minorities, OBCs and SC/STs, about 17 years ago. He has been consolidating this bloc, known in Karnataka as Ahinda, to ensure they stick to the Congress in every election.


The Indian society, Siddaramaiah said, suffered from not only gender inequality, but also caste inequality. Backward class women lack the social, economic and educational wherewithal to compete with the rest and get their due political representation. Since there is already political reservation for SC/STs, giving reservation to backward class women will not be a problem.

“If we look at the women's reservation bill closely, we get the impression that it seeks to achieve selfish political goals rather than ensuring women get their political due. If the current bill is implemented in its present form, women may have to wait for another two decades to get political reservation,” the Congress CM sought to warn the BJP.

If PM Narendra Modi’s intentions were sincere, he should have presented the same Bill in the Lok Sabha which the Rajya Sabha passed in 2010 during the UPA reign. Since the RS approval was still valid, the process of making it into a law soon after its passage in the Lok Sabha would have started early. But Modi made minor changes in the Bill so that it must be tabled in the Rajya Sabha again, Siddaramaiah said, while seeking to remind the political parties that giving 33% quota for women was a tall dream Rajiv Gandhi nurtured. In 2018, Rahul Gandhi too appealed to Modi to try to get the Bill passed, rising himself above politics, he added.