Even as House chairman, vice-president Hamid Ansari, tried to initiate the debate, the bill’s copies were torn up and strewn around him.
Women literally brought the house down on Monday. The Women’s Reservation Bill, scheduled to be debated and voted on in the Rajya Sabha, was tabled amid bedlam, with the country’s parliamentarians not displaying, well, parliamentary behaviour.
The bill was moved at 2pm in the House, after Question Hour was disrupted over the Ranganath Mishra Commission report. However, no sooner did law minister M Veerappa Moily move the bill, than members of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Samajwadi Party (SP) and MP Ejaz Ali, suspended from Janata Dal (U), rushed to the well.
Even as House chairman, vice-president Hamid Ansari, tried to initiate the debate, the bill’s copies were torn up and strewn around him.
Rajniti Prasad and Nand Kishore Yadav went up to the Chair and tried to grab pens and stationery from Ansari’s table. Ali, in fact, reached up and pulled off the microphones attached to the chairman’s seat. SP MP Kamal Akhtar climbed onto the tables of the Rajya Sabha stenographers and tore up the bill to
pieces.
Given the violent turn of events, the chairman adjourned the House for an hour. All major leaders in the Rajya Sabha went into a huddle but, as one adjournment followed another till 6pm, it rapidly became clear that the government had lost its nerve.
Women MPs from the Lok Sabha like Supriya Sule, Deepa Dasmunsi, Anu Tandon, Shruti Chourdhary and Dr Jyoti Mirdha, who thought they would be present to witness history being made from the visitor’s gallery of the Rajya Sabha, slowly filed out as it became clear that the bill was stuck.
The women’s bill has always been violently contested, thus the government’s lack of a plan despite knowing all the variables has come as a disappointment to both the BJP and the Left. Women MPs were particularly disappointed with the chairman of the committee on the Bill, Jayanti Natarajan, asking the objectors to leave the House.
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