Women's Reservation Bill tactic to divert attention from caste census: Rahul Gandhi

New Delhi, September 22

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Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday welcomed the Women’s Reservation Bill but called it a “distraction and diversionary tactic from the demand for a caste census”.

Addressing a press conference at the AICC headquarters here, Rahul also demanded that 33 per cent reservation for women in the legislature come into effect immediately and not after census followed by delimitation.

Release previous data

Why is the PM not releasing the earlier caste census data? The PM hails himself as an OBC leader, then why are there only three secretaries from OBC? Rahul Gandhi, Congress

Raising questions on the timeline for the implementation of the Bill, he said it was unclear if the reservation for women would ever be implemented. This was a distraction and a diversionary tactic from an OBC census, he said.

The Congress MP said when he was researching for his Parliament speech, he was shocked to discover that only three out of 90 union government secretaries were from OBCs. He said this showed the hugely disproportionate representation of OBCs in bureaucracy. People belonging to OBC categories perhaps formed 50 per cent of the population, he said.

Rahul said to be able to distribute power fairly among people, data is required. Asked if he regrets that OBC quota was not provided under the Bill related to women reservation brought by the Congress-led UPA in 2010, he replied in the affirmative. “This should have been done then”, he said and added that the quota for OBC women would be provided if the INDIA bloc formed the government at the Centre.