Women’s Reservation Bill is welcomed by Nitish, but with conditions

Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, hailed the women’s reservation bill that the Narendra Modi administration had sent to the Centre on Tuesday. However, he added a few conditions, including quotas for women from OBCs and Extremely Backward Classes.

The JD(U) supreme leader, whose party has 16 Lok Sabha members, also bemoaned the Centre’s “failure to conduct the census, which should have held by 2021,” after which new delineations of assembly and parliamentary districts would take place in accordance with the bill before the implementation of women’s reservation.

According to Kumar, there should be quotas for women from Other Backward Classes and Extremely Backward Classes, according to a statement released by the CMO.

The quotas for women would have been feasible much sooner had the census been conducted. The Bihar Chief Minister urged the Centre to hasten the census and conduct a caste counting.

Notably, Kumar had long demanded a “caste census” in which social groups other than SCs and STs were also enumerated. When the Modi administration refused, Kumar decided to organize a comparable caste survey at the state level.

The JD(U) leader claims that a new estimate was “much needed” since the previous caste census was conducted way back in 1931, and is supported by allies like RJD in this claim.

The opposition coalition INDIA, viewed as the result of Kumar’s attempts to bring together anti-BJP parties after leaving the NDA, has pledged to conduct a caste census if it wins the Lok Sabha elections next year.

In his remarks, Kumar went into great detail about his own initiatives, such as creating quotas for women in panchayats and local government positions, including the police force.

On the first day in the new Parliament building, the Centre revived a plan that had been on hold for years by introducing a constitutional amendment bill on Tuesday that would reserve 33% of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and state legislatures.

The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam women’s reservation law, sponsored in the Lower House by Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal, won’t go into effect until a delimitation operation is finished, so it’s unlikely to be in place for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.