Modi Should Apologise for Shelving 2023 Women's Quota Law, Not for Losing a Political Trap, Says CPI's Binoy Viswam

Thiruvananthapuram: CPI State Secretary Binoy Viswam has hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address to the nation following the defeat of the delimitation-linked bills in the Lok Sabha, saying the Prime Minister owes women an apology — but for an entirely different set of reasons.

In a sharply-worded Facebook post, the CPI leader said Modi should apologise not for the defeat of his political gambit, but for locking away the women's reservation law passed in 2023 and doing nothing to implement it. "The Prime Minister should seek forgiveness from the women of this country — not to conceal the embarrassment of his own political trap being defeated," he wrote.

Binoy Viswam listed a sweeping indictment of what he called the BJP and RSS's record on women, demanding apologies for reviving the shelved law only after bundling it with delimitation and a census linkage in a bid to deceive the people; for treating women as mere vote-gathering instruments rather than equal citizens; for concealing the RSS's anti-women character by denying women primary membership while creating the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti as a parallel body to placate them; for excluding the country's President, who is a woman, from the inauguration of the new Parliament building; for the sexual violence and public humiliation inflicted on women in Manipur; for providing cover to a fascist, patriarchal order that treats women as second-class citizens across the country; and for attempting to implement the primitive Manusmriti doctrine of "na stri swatantryam arhati" — that women deserve no independence — through political action.

He also condemned the government for using women as pawns in a political chess game driven entirely by electoral calculations.