‘Frustrated’ PM Modi turned official speech into ‘mudslinging, outright lies’: Opposition

Prime Minister Narendra Modi turned an official address to the nation into a political speech “full of mudslinging and outright lies”, the Opposition said on Saturday.

Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge said that Modi must “stop lying to the nation” that the draft legislation defeated by the Opposition in Parliament on Friday “was an amendment to the Women’s Reservation Bill”.

“It was not,” Kharge said. “This was purely a delimitation bill, brought in to create further division and redraw the electoral map in a manner that can only benefit the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party].”

The comments came after Modi, in an address to the nation on Saturday, criticised Opposition parties for defeating in the Lok Sabha the Union government’s bill to amend the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act and redraw the boundaries of electoral constituencies.

On Friday, the 2026 Constitution 131st Amendment Bill, one of three draft legislations, was defeated in the Lower House of Parliament. As a Constitution amendment bill, it required a two-thirds majority of votes to pass. The ruling National Democratic Alliance does not have a two-thirds majority of MPs in any House and had required the support of the Opposition to pass the amendment.

In his address on Saturday, Modi claimed that Opposition parties stood against the draft legislation, which he described as the women’s reservation bill, for their “selfish political interests”.

Opposition parties, including the Congress, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Trinamool Congress, have maintained that they supported the amendments to the Women’s Reservation Act, but were opposed to the proposed delimitation of electoral constituencies.

Women are not BJP’s priority, says Congress

The Congress chief on Saturday said that Modi must “stop mixing up the delimitation bills” with the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act. He added that Modi should implement the 33% quota for women in the existing 543 Lok Sabha seats under the 2023 law.

“Modi ji mentioned Congress 59 times and women barely a few times,” Kharge said on social media. “That tells the country everything about his priorities. Women are not the BJP’s priority. Congress is, because Congress stands on the right side of history.”

The Congress also said that the Model Code of Conduct is in force in several states because of Assembly elections and “it was very clear how PM Modi misused official machinery to attack his opponents”. “This is a travesty of democracy and the Constitution of India,” Kharge said.

The code is a set of guidelines issued by the poll panel that political parties, candidates and governments must follow during an election. It sets guardrails for speeches, campaigning, meetings, processions, election manifestos and other aspects of the polls.

Polling in Tamil Nadu will be held on April 23 and in West Bengal on April 23 and April 29. The votes in the two states will be counted on May 4 along with those in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry, which held polls on April 9.

‘High time this rhetoric be stopped’

Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP John Brittas said that no prime minister had ever used an address to the nation to criticise and target the Opposition “in this manner”.

Modi broke “this long-standing democratic norm” with his address on Saturday, Brittas said on social media on Saturday.

“By...likening [the Opposition’s] actions to ‘foeticide’ and being ‘anti-women’, this speech has made it evident that the BJP is willing to go to any extent to undermine healthy parliamentary conventions and constitutional traditions,” he said. “It’s evident that the government has lost its balance after the drubbing it got in the Lok Sabha yesterday.”

Brittas said it was “high time this rhetoric be stopped”.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said it was “deeply unfortunate” that the prime minister chose to “mislead the nation rather than address it honestly”.

She said the Trinamool Congress had long supported greater representation for women and had a high proportion of women representatives in both Parliament and the state legislature.

However, the party was firmly opposed to delimitation, she added. The Trinamool Congress chief said that the exercise amounted to an “assault on federal democracy”.

Banerjee criticised women’s reservation being coupled with delimitation, arguing that the government was using women as a “shield” for a “political agenda”. Further, she asked why the legislation had been brought forward when several states were heading into elections.

She added that the prime minister should address Parliament directly rather than the nation in a manner that avoids scrutiny, describing his remarks as “cowardly, hypocritical and fork-tongued”.

Her party colleague, Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien on Saturday said that “the worst form of insulting women is to have used them as a decoy to try and pass the delimitation bill”.

Trinamool Congress’ Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra said on social media that the prime minister’s “dramebaazi and your godi media script will not hide the truth – women’s reservation already passed in 2023” and notified on Thursday.

“Nothing stops you from implementing it now and giving 1/3 of 543 seats to women the way TMC has done,” she added on Saturday.

The Union government was seeking to increase the strength of the Lok Sabha to 815 from 543 and to operationalise the 33% quota for women in the Lok Sabha and Assemblies under the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act. A three-day special session of Parliament to discuss the bills had begun on Thursday.

The Opposition INDIA bloc had said that while it supports women’s reservation, it will oppose the bill for delimitation of Lok Sabha seats.

Opposition parties have said that population-based delimitation would give an undue advantage to northern and central states in the Lok Sabha, as the proportion of seats in the North would be higher. They also noted that the ruling BJP has greater support in northern states than in the South.

Also read:

• How Modi government aims to use women’s representation to expand Lok Sabha using 2011 census numbers
• Why delimitation in Assam and Kashmir led to charges of gerrymandering
• The delimitation trap: Is India moving towards the Chinese model of domesticating debate?