NEW DELHI, SEP 8 (PTI): The Congress on Tuesday alleged that the National Commission for Women (NCW) was being misused by the BJP and claimed that women representatives were not allowed to speak during a workshop organised by it.
The NCW is not a proxy of the BJP and is supposed to stand for the upliftment of women, the opposition party said.
The allegations were made by Congress spokesperson Ragini Nayak in reference to a ‘capacity building workshop’ organised by the NCW in Faridabad during September 7-8.
“The theme of this workshop was- ‘Gender-Responsive Governance for Women Legislators’ and its objective was: ‘She the Changemaker’. But look at the contradiction here that in this programme, women representatives from different states were seated on the stage, but the inauguration of the programme was done by a man — namely Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla,” Nayak said at a press conference she held with party leaders Anila Bhendia and Bindhu Krishna.
The Congress leader wondered why the organiser of the programme, which had a stated objective of empowering women, could not find a woman to inaugurate the programme.
“Whenever the issue of delimitation comes up, the southern and northeastern states are treated like stepchildren. We saw that the sisters who had come from the southern and northeastern states kept saying that we couldn’t understand anything at all,” Nayak said. She also alleged that the non-Hindi speaking participants were not given the programme documents in a local language or in English despite their asking for it.
“The women’s commission is operating in Narendra Modi’s style — just ‘listen to our Mann Ki Baat’, you have no right to say your own piece,” she said.
Krishna said, “We expected the NCW workshop in Surajkund, Faridabad, to offer more information, ideas, and guidance on making better laws. Just before the function, we were invited to sit on the dais but were not allowed to speak. All sessions were in Hindi. As we are from South India, we requested that English also be used so we could understand, but nobody listened.”
“We had hoped to gain more from the two-day workshop, but the discussions were mostly about filing police complaints and calling ambulances,” she said.
“The programme could’ve been held at the BJP office — why was all this done from the Women’s Commission’s platform?” Krishna said.
