Tiruvananthapuram: After campaigning aggressively across the nation for caste census, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi says the time has come to set a target for women empowerment in the political and administrative sphere through power sharing.
Addressing a big convention of the Kerala unit of Mahila Congress in Kochi, Rahul Gandhi said; ''I thought a good target for the Congress party would be if in ten years from today, 50 percent of our chief ministers are women. Today we don’t have a single chief minister who is a woman. But I know many women in the Congress party have the qualities to become very good chief ministers.''
Rahul said the party has given women presidents and even a woman prime minister because the Congress fundamentally believes that women should share power in the country. “Women are superior to men. They have more patience, compassion and long-term vision than men.
Rahul hits out at RSS
Rahul said the Congress is different from organisations like the RSS when it comes to the empowerment of women.
The RSS ideology which according to him has no space for women. “In its entire history, the RSS has not allowed women into its ranks. When I made these statements a couple of times, the RSS leadership said we have women's organisations.
The question is not whether they have women's organisations. The question is are women allowed to share power in the RSS? The answer is no. The RSS is purely a male organisation.
“We believe women should make their own choices. What a woman does, what she wears, what profession she does is her decision and her decision only. If you understand Indian politics deeply you will realise that the real fight between the RSS and the Congress is about the role that women should have in politics. You can see the difference in their actions,” he said.
Rahul said it is the first time in history that a bill passed in parliament will be implemented a decade later. “I have never seen any other Bill which will be implemented ten years after it has been passed. The only Bill that the BJP implemented ten years after its passing has to do with the empowerment of women.
The Congress leader’s push for more power for women in the political sphere assumes significance in the backdrop of the schemes being implemented by various political parties to woo women voters. However, Rahul believes that the time has come to think beyond the beneficiary schemes and financial benefits and give actual power to women.
