New Delhi, April 17 (IANS) Leader of Opposition (LoP) in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Friday credited the Opposition INDIA bloc’s unity for the defeat of the Amendment Bill related to the women’s reservation in Lok Sabha.

“The Amendment Bill has fallen. They used an unconstitutional trick in the name of women to break the Constitution. India has seen it. INDIA has stopped it. Hail the Constitution,” he said on social media platform X.

Earlier, LoP Gandhi’s ‘magician’ barb, purportedly aimed at the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while opposing the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill and two related Bills created a furore in the Lower House.

The House saw noisy scenes, angry exchanges and demands for apology as Rahul Gandhi’s magician jibe left the Treasury bench members infuriated, who called it a “blatant mockery” of the Parliament and 1.4 billion people.

He said that there is a “central confusion” in the minds of Bharatiya Janata Party that they are the people of India, they are the armed forces, which in reality was not and asked them to “stop hiding behind the armed forces as cowards”.

Opposing the proposed delimitation, LoP Gandhi said his grandmother Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, both the country’s former Prime Ministers, chose not to proceed with the exercise during their respective tenures understanding the hazards that it may unfold.

Earlier, after two days of heated debate, the Bill secured 298 votes in favour and 230 against but still failed to cross the two-thirds majority threshold required for constitutional amendments.

The Bill was ambitious in scope. It proposed increasing the Lok Sabha’s strength from 543 to 850 seats, a move tied to the long-delayed delimitation exercise that would redraw electoral boundaries based on population changes.

Alongside this, it aimed to operationalise the 33 per cent quota for women in the Lok Sabha and state Assemblies, a reform that had been promised but deferred until after the next delimitation.

The Union government said that the expansion and redistribution of seats was necessary to correct the imbalance between voters and representatives, a gap that has widened since the last delimitation froze boundaries based on the 1971 Census.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah both pressed the case for the Bill, warning that women across the country would closely watch the Opposition’s stance.

Union Home Minister Shah accused the Congress of historically blocking delimitation and claimed that the grand old party was once again depriving citizens of fair representation.

He insisted that linking women’s reservation to delimitation was the only way to ensure equity in representation.

–IANS

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