Union Minister Kiren Rijiju has stepped up his criticism of the Congress party, claiming that MP Shashi Tharoor effectively "admitted" his party holds an anti-women bias. Speaking in an interview, Rijiju recounted a private exchange between the two following a parliamentary session on the Women’s Reservation Bill. According to the Minister, Tharoor suggested that while the Congress might be viewed as anti-women, no woman would ever label him as such. Rijiju argued that this remark was an implicit acknowledgment of the party’s broader stance, even if Tharoor sought to distance his personal reputation from it.
The row follows the failure of the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill to pass through the Lok Sabha. The proposed legislation sought to increase the number of seats in the house from 543 to 816, a move intended to facilitate a 33 per cent reservation for women through a post-census delimitation exercise. While the BJP has accused the Opposition of "celebrating" the bill's defeat and depriving women of their rights, the Congress and its allies have countered that the link to delimitation was a political ploy. They argued that redrawing the electoral map would unfairly penalise southern states for their successful population control and insisted the reservation should be implemented within the existing seat structure.
Rijiju dismissed the notion that the Bharatiya Janata Party had anticipated the bill's rejection, questioning how any party could justify voting against such a significant measure for women. He noted that the delimitation provisions were already part of previous legislative frameworks and questioned why the Opposition had not raised these objections earlier.
Turning his attention to the political landscape in West Bengal, the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs claimed that a pro-Modi wave had firmly taken hold. He argued that the electorate has grown weary of the economic decline oversaw by successive Congress, Left, and TMC administrations, and now views the BJP as the only viable alternative to "clean up" the state. Rijiju too fired some harsh words at the Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee by saying that those politicians who build their careers by launching smear campaigns against the Prime Minister, will eventually suffer political defeat in their own hands.
On the other hand, he refuted allegations related to any sort of pressure in the case of defection from AAP to BJP. According to him, Arvind Kejriwal had converted the Aam Aadmi Party into a 'private enterprise' and therefore principled members were defecting of their own volition since they believed that the AAP was not adhering to its core ideology anymore. Regarding future politics, Rijiju stated that the BJP was very confident of winning the coming Assam assembly election by a landslide in the year 2026 despite many controversies.
Also read: Tharoor slams ‘politics’ over women’s reservation law
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