Prime minister raises eyebrows with 29-minute rant on national television

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seething with suppressed fury, delivered on Saturday, 18 April 2026 a most unstatesmanlike address to the nation. Visibly rattled at the government’s failure to muster the required two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha the previous day for the passage of a new women’s reservation bill tagged to the 2011 census and a new formula to increase the size of the House, the prime minister began with a perfunctory apology to the women of the country.

He changed gears in less than a minute and devoted the rest of his speech to berating the opposition parties for allegedly putting their party above national interest.

In his address to the nation for over 29 minutes, the prime minister mentioned Congress 59 times, Samajwadi Party 10 times, Trinamool Congress seven times and DMK five times. These dynastic parties, the PM said, were responsible for not allowing women get their rightful representation because they cared only for women in the dynasties. The prime minister, however, failed to explain why there are less than 10 per cent BJP MLAs in the Gujarat assembly after 30 years of uninterrupted rule by the party.

The prime minister, as usual, was economical with the truth and failed to mention that the women’s reservation bill as unanimously passed in 2023 is still the law; that his government had notified or re-notified it in the gazette on 16 April the day before the Lok Sabha voted on the new bill. He also failed to mention that his government had tied the new bill to Delimitation based on the 2011 census by bypassing the ‘first census after 2026’ as provided by his own government in 2023.

The aim apparently was to avoid the outcome of the caste census and offer a ‘quota within the quota’. The speech similarly omitted mentioning that the new bill was also tied to increasing the size of the Lok Sabha by raising the maximum possible strength from the current 550 to 850.

Accusing the Congress, DMK, the Samajwadi party and Trinamool Congress for allegedly taking women for granted, the prime minister seemed to be inciting the women when he said that every time the women would see leaders of these parties, they would be reminded of the insult. The Opposition parties, the PM declared, would be punished for their sin by the people. These parties were guilty of foeticide, the PM added dramatically, by killing the women’s reservation bill on Friday. When the bill fell in the Lok Sabha, he recalled, members of these political parties were rejoicing, thumping their desks and clapping.

Much of the venom in the PM’s speech was reserved for the Congress. Singling out the Indian National Congress as the single major culprit for all that is ailing the country, the PM lashed out at the ‘negative’ politics of the Congress. Congress is not only anti-reforms but also anti-women, he said, and claimed that the party was opposed to all reforms like ‘One Nation One Election’, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, the campaign against Maoist insurgency and even the Citizenship Amendment Act.

In the speech, the PM resorted to lies, pointed out Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, by wrongly claiming that Congress had opposed ‘Aadhaar, GST, mobiles and Jan Dhan accounts in banks’. The PM also singled out the party’s opposition to abrogating Article 370 and the Uniform Civil Code.