Hit by disquiet, Sushma picks up whip

New Delhi, March 11: The BJP called an emergency meeting of its parliamentarians this evening to allow them to “freely” air their views on the women’s reservation bill after two of its MPs opposed it publicly.

The meeting was convened by Sushma Swaraj, Opposition leader in the Lok Sabha, at the residence of L.K. Advani — who is the parliamentary party chairman. The dissenting members, Hukmdev Narayan Yadav and Yogi Adityanath, are from the Lower House, where the bill is yet to be brought in.

Sushma said a whip would be issued in the Lok Sabha — as was done in the Rajya Sabha — that an MP could defy at the risk of expulsion. However, Adityanath declared he would defy the whip, comparing the bill to “unseasonal rain that will do no good to the country”.

The dissension is not good news for the government, which is depending on the BJP and the Left to pass the legislation.

The BJP had heaped kudos on itself after helping the Treasury benches steer the bill through choppy waters in the Rajya Sabha, despite reservations openly voiced earlier by MPs like Vinay Katiyar. The perception was Arun Jaitley, leader of the Opposition in the upper House, had “successfully” managed the inner-party “contradictions”.

This evening, Sushma swung into damage-control mode, telling the MPs to say what they wished to. After over an hour of talks, she made it clear that while the BJP would try and evolve a consensus among the MPs, the party would not dilute or renege on its stand.

Nobody would go on record on what transpired at the meeting. But sources said the apprehensions of most MPs centred on what seat-rotation meant, whether women could also contest from the non-reserved seats in spite of the quotas and whether the bill would curtail the “aspirations” of the “recently empowered” Other Backward Classes by making it “easier” for “privileged” women to get elected.

The other big concern was whether rotation implied that an MP would no longer need to nurture his constituency given the provision that he would anyway “forfeit” it to a woman once in every three general elections.

The OBC MPs wanted to know why the Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal and Bahujan Samaj Party were insisting on a sub-quota for backward classes.

“The Samajwadis and the others have their ears to the ground. The message has travelled that the upward political mobility of the OBCs is going to be checked by this bill,” an OBC MP said. At the meeting, he reportedly reminded senior leaders that the OBCs had always constituted a powerful constituency for the BJP and it could “ignore” their interests at its peril.

The other issue that got the MPs’ backs up was the eviction of the Rajya Sabha dissenters by force.

Many MPs asked why the BJP had silently watched the spectacle of the seven MPs being bodily lifted out of the House. “We played into the Congress’s hands. Why did our leaders pro-actively help the Congress?” an MP is said to have asked the top leaders at the meeting.

The senior leaders said they had “reasons to believe” that the government would not resort to such use of force in the Lok Sabha when the bill was discussed there, but apparently not many MPs were convinced.

Aware that tempers were running high in his party, Jaitley had said earlier in the day in the Rajya Sabha that he was ready to apologise for the suspended MPs on behalf of the Opposition, but added that the action against them must be revoked.

At the end of this evening’s meeting, the MPs were asked to campaign hard for women’s reservation, an idea top leaders claimed was “pioneered” by the BJP in 1995, and thwart the Congress’s bid to “steal the credit”.

Women had emerged as a huge and independent electoral constituency, they were told, and support for the bill would translate into “gains”.


The Telegraph