Prabhu Chawla (PC): Why don’t women hold good positions in the Samajwadi Party? Will you increase the number of women candidates in the 2017 Assembly elections?
Akhilesh Yadav (AY): I promise to give key positions in the administration to the maximum number of winning women candidates. At all levels of governance, women are making good use of reservations and are coming forth and contesting. Remember, we are sitting in a state which has had a woman chief minister. Even MLA Rita Bahuguna Joshi (seated in the front row) has headed her party (Congress) in UP.
PC: Does the Samajwadi Party plan to give more tickets to women?
AY: I will give the opportunity to more and more women to contest and win the elections. I also promise that women who have done well in panchayat elections or have left other careers to take to politics will be a given a chance. No one can succeed by ignoring women.
PC: Why don’t you give women officers better roles in the administration?
AY: There are many female district magistrates and principal secretaries in the state. Mulayam Singh Yadav, as chief minister, appointed Neera Yadav as the state’s first woman chief secretary. Our party does not believe in gender bias. We give equally pivotal postings to women administrators. In recent years, women have begun entering the police force too and are doing good work.
PC: Shouldn’t that number go up?
AY: Yes, if more women qualify for the IAS and IPS services, we will certainly give them key positions in the administration.
PC: Your biggest programme for the socio-economic welfare of women?
AY: The Samajwadi Pension Yojana covers over 40 lakh families and is the country’s largest welfare scheme, with the woman in the family as beneficiary. During its implementation, we noticed that men didn’t want to open bank accounts in women’s names. But attitudes and times are changing and, through policy, we want to lead that change.
PC:Your take on the so-called growing climate of intolerance in the country?
AY: It is very easy to be communal but difficult to be secular. Throwing ink on someone if they sing or attacking a person or a community for what they eat should be discouraged. Uttar Pradesh was the first to give a befitting reply to such radical forces. The BJP’s loss in Panchayat elections and the recent defeat in Bihar shows that this kind of politics doesn’t work. Such behaviour only hinders the development-oriented vision of the PM.