Rahul Gandhi says 100% regret that UPA government didn't include OBC sub-quota in its women's Bill
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s new-found pitch for ‘OBC sub-quota’ in the women’s reservation bill on Friday exposed him to the fault-lines and contradictions of his party’s record on the subject, resulting in him expressing “100% regret” for the previous UPA regime not incorporating the same OBC sub-quota in its version of the bill.
Gandhi’s comment came in the course of a press conference, where he repeated the demand for OBC sub-quota in the legislation that the Modi government pushed through in Parliament on Thursday, incidentally, with Congress and most other Opposition parties’ support.
He accused the government of using the bill as a “distraction” and claimed that it won’t be implemented “for 10 years” and maintained that “there is no need to wait for the census or delimitation exercise” but the legislation should be “implemented immediately”. He reiterated demand for a caste census and sought an answer from the PM why “among the 90 top secretaries of the government, only three were OBCs” and claimed these three “only control 5% of the budget”.
He claimed that women won’t be impressed by the bill the government got passed.
Asked why he was making the demand for OBC sub-quota only when he is in Opposition given the Congress-led UPA regime for 10 years didn’t incorporate the same OBC sub-quota in its Bill and whether he regretted it, Gandhi said: “I have 100% regret that we didn’t include OBC sub-quota in the women’s reservation bill when we were in government. It should have been done then.
We will have it done now.”
He didn’t explain how. Asked what was the proportion of OBC representation among the government secretaries during the Congress government era, Gandhi said, “If there was low representation during our
