Uttar Pradesh legislature special session: BJP should appoint a woman as its national chief, says CLP leader

Sirathu MLA Pallavi Patel said the BJP has no real desire to grant women’s reservation, accusing the party of stalling the process by tying it to delimitation and the census. She claimed that if the BJP were sincere, it would have taken follow-up actions on the 2023 bill, noting that no official gazette notification has been issued.

In the state assembly’s special session on women’s empowerment, Congress Legislature Party leader Aradhna Mishra challenged the BJP to appoint a woman as the party’s national president and asserted that the reservation for women should not be conditioned on delimitation. She argued that half the country’s population seeks its rightful entitlement and that this issue concerns all voters, not just political parties.

The Women’s Reservation Bill was passed into law in 2023 with the Congress’s support. The article notes that the bill has remained unimplemented to date, and the NDA government has linked its implementation to delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies, which Mishra says bears no relation to women’s reservation.