Sonia praises Maya in C’wealth lecture
UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi praised BSP leader and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati in her lecture to the Commonwealth Foundation in London on Thursday night. Without naming the BSP chief, Mrs Gandhi described her as “the chief minister of India’s most populous state” and added that she is “from a section of society subjected to discrimination for centuries.”
In her speech on “Women as Agents of Change” to an audience of more than 600, including Commonwealth secretary-general Kamalesh Sharma, at Marlborough House, Mrs Gandhi also reiterated her support for the women’s reservation bill and said that the UPA coalition government would persevere “to get it approved” by the Lok Sabha.
Women in India, Mrs Gandhi said, had emerged as catalysts of change in politics, especially at the local level.
However, she said: “I am less than happy to admit that at the national level we have not yet been successful. Women’s representation in Parliament has hovered between 9 and 11 per cent, a figure that is considerably lower than in many other democracies.”
Mrs Gandhi did not take any questions and did not interact with the media at the function.
The Congress president praised the “amazing resilience” of India women, “their fortitude and courage, their capacity to overcome every obstacle, their readiness to grasp every opportunity.”
Women in India, she said, have emerged as “agents of change” in five areas, including self-help groups pooling savings and securing loans for local projects; rural self-government; social activism; the establishment of local enterprise collectives, some of which have been replicated elsewhere in Asia; and the setting up of village information centres and IT kiosks.
Calling for better strides in the status of women, Mrs Gandhi said: “May this be, not the century of any particular country, but the century when women finally come into their own, the century when representative democracy is re-imagined to give women their due share, the century when the vocabulary of politics and culture is re-engineered fully to include that other half of mankind.”
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