After the Chief Ministers in the three States of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh took oaths along with their respective cabinets, Congress’ hypocrisy on women empowerment is lying exposed. Despite Rahul Gandhi’s tall claims about the inclusion of women in politics, his party failed to give adequate representation to women in the three states where they recently formed the government.
The composition of the cabinets in these three states exposes the shallowness of the promises of women empowerment made by the party. In Chhattisgarh cabinet, there is only one woman legislator out of a total of 12 legislators. Similarly, Rajasthan cabinet is no better with one woman out of 23 as compared to 4 women legislators in the Vasundhara Raje government. There are 2 women in the 28-member Madya Pradesh cabinet led by Kamalnath who is facing allegations of involvement in the 1984 riots.
Of late Rahul Gandhi has portrayed himself as a strong advocate of women’s rights and has been talking about reservation for women in politics in what appears as an attempt to create a vote bank of women. Earlier this month he had directed the state governments of Congress and its allies to pass a resolution to reserve one-third of its seats in the Lok Sabha and the Legislative Assemblies for women.
In stark contrast to his political posturing, Rahul Gandhi’s party chose to appease Muslim fundamentalists instead of supporting the empowerment of Muslim women by opposing the Triple Talaq Bill introduced by the NDA government. However, if one looks at the history of Congress Party, this was not unexpected as Rahul’s father Rajiv Gandhi had also acted in the same way when he overturned the verdict of the Supreme Court in the Shah Bano case only to appease the fundamentalist Muslims for political gains.
Despite his own hypocrisy on the issue of women empowerment, he often targets the BJP and the RSS for not giving equal representation to women. He once commented “Have you ever seen women wearing shorts working in RSS?” without realizing the sexist nature of the remark. In the month of July this year, Rahul had included a total of seven women out of 51 members in the Congress Working Committee, one of them being his own mother Sonia Gandhi.
