Congress leader Rahul Gandhi today launched a counter-offensive against the Modi government while addressing a press conference on the women's reservation bill. Rahul Gandhi reiterated that the women's bill should be implemented with immediate effect with OBC reservation. "Women's Reservation Bill is great but we received two footnotes that Census and Delimitation need to be done before that. Both of these will take years. The truth is that the Reservation can be implemented today...This is not a complicated matter but the Government doesn't want to do that. The government has presented this before the country but it will be implemented 10 years from now. Nobody knows if this will even be implemented. This is a distraction tactic, diversion tactic," said Gandhi.
Rahul Gandhi also said that he fully regretted not including the OBC quota in the women's reservation bill brought by the UPA government in 2010.
He also said that the government should make public the data of caste census carried out by the Congress government. He also demanded that the government should carry out the next census based on caste.
Repeating his statement that there are only three OBC secretaries out of 90, Rahul Gandhi said that it doesn't matter how many OBC MPs are there in the BJP as they don't play a decision-making role. "They (BJP MPs) have no role in law-making," said Gandhi.
Gandhi was responding to Union Home Minister Amit Shah's remarks that it's the MPs who run the government and not the secretaries. Shah had made the remark while responding to Rahul Gandhi's remark related to OBC secretaries. Rahul Gandhi said that the government should make public the number of OBC population and they should be given their due rights.
The women's reservation bill was passed by Parliament yesterday and will become law after the President's nod. The bill was passed by the Lok Sabha on September 20 and the Rajya Sabha on September 21.
