Opposition party leaders condemned Modi’s address, noting that his broadside against them was delivered via an official address.
A day after his government’s contentious bid to remove the freeze on delimitation and expand the strength of the Lok Sabha to “operationalise” women’s reservation failed to pass muster in the House, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched an extraordinary broadside against the opposition on Saturday (April 18), likening its position in parliament yesterday to “female foeticide”.
Modi used his national primetime address to single out opposition parties including the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the Trinamool Congress (TMC), whose home bastions of Tamil Nadu and West Bengal respectively will vote in days’ time, despite the model code of conduct (MCC) urging against the use of official mass media for the
Opposition parties condemned Modi’s address, accusing him of delivering a “distress address rather than a national address” and having “misused yet another public platform”.
At the outset of his 29-minute address, Modi ‘sought forgiveness’ from India’s “mothers, sisters and daughters” for the fact that his government’s three-Bill package failed to secure a two-thirds majority of Lok Sabha MPs present and voting during Friday’s special session of parliament.
Declaring that “a woman may forget everything but never an insult to herself”, the prime minister went on to say that the opposition’s decision to vote against the Bills was not only insulting to women but was comparable to female foeticide.
The Congress and its allies, said Modi, “have committed female foeticide in parliament in front of everyone”. “They have committed female foeticide! Parties like the Congress, the TMC, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the DMK are the culprits of this female foeticide. They are offenders against the country’s Constitution. They are the offenders against the country’s nari shakti [woman power],” the prime minister said.
Accusing these parties of voting against the three-Bill package on the grounds that they are scared women’s reservation would undermine their “parivarvad [‘family-ism’]” – and blaming the Congress more broadly for “all the major challenges the country is facing today” – Modi repeatedly criticised the DMK and the TMC apart from the Congress and the SP by name.
This is despite the fact that the MCC, which is in force in poll-bound Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, says that the ruling party at the Union level must ‘scrupulously avoid’ the “misuse of official mass media during the election period for partisan coverage of political news … with a view to furthering the prospects of the party in power”.
Multiple leaders of opposition parties noted the fact that Modi used a national address to criticise them.
TMC MP and spokesperson Sagarika Ghose said that “Modi has now used Doordarshan – India’s national broadcaster funded by the tax payer —NOT to address citizens concerns on LPG, fuel or jobs— but to make an out and out political party speech targeting the opposition”.
“Modi misuses every institution for pathetically short sighted low level politics and has just misused yet another public platform. Shameful, disgraceful and desperate,” she wrote on X.
Jairam Ramesh, Congress MP and party general secretary for communications, said that while “a sitting Prime Minister’s address to the nation” is “meant to be a non-partisan address intended to build national resolve and confidence”, Modi’s speech Saturday was a “pathetic partisan and polemical attack”.
Such a “Distress Address rather than a National Address would have been more appropriate in a Press Conference”, he added, with Rajya Sabha leader of opposition and Ramesh’s party colleague Mallikarjun Kharge calling Modi’s speech made while the MCC is in force “a travesty of Democracy and the Constitution of India”.
Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Manoj Kumar Jha in an open letter to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar stated that Modi’s “Address to the Nation truly appeared to be an electoral address” and asked that it “be added to his election expenditure”.
In his speech Modi again defended his government’s Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill – which among other things proposed to amend the women’s reservation Act of 2023 to hasten its implementation – the Delimitation Bill and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill.
The proposed legislations were a “mahayagna for removing obstacles from the path of India’s 21st-century women” and a means for the “equal development of all states”, regardless of whether they are in the north, south, east or west of India and of their populations, Modi said.
The “government has made it clear from day one that neither would the proportion of participation [in the Lok Sabha] of any state change, nor would anyone’s representation decrease”. Instead, “every state would undergo an increase in seats by an equal proportion”, said Modi, accusing the opposition of “incessantly lying about delimitation”.
However, while the government verbally claimed during the special session of parliament that all states would see the number of their Lok Sabha seats go up by 50%, neither the constitution amendment Bill nor the delimitation Bill made any reference to such an arrangement.
The constitutional amendment Bill’s bid to remove the 50-year freeze on delimitation as a means to “operationalise” women’s reservation, read together with the indication to imminently use the 2011 census to carry out an expansion of the Lok Sabha, would mean that the Hindi belt states that did not temper their population growth would benefit in the House at the expense of southern and other states that did do so over the years.
Also Read: First Crack in 12 Years: Modi Govt’s Constitutional Push on Delimitation Packed in Women’s Bill Falls Short https://www.vibesofindia.com/first-crack-in-12-years-modi-govts-constitutional-push-on-delimitation-packed-in-womens-bill-falls-short/
