The ruling BJP on Saturday announced a nationwide campaign to expose what it described as the “anti-women mindset” of the Congress-led INDIA bloc.Led by BJP president Nitin Nabin, the party said it would hold demonstrations against the Congress and its allies right to the village level and expose “their conspiracy to deny 70 crore Indian women their rightful due of political representation”.The BJP also fielded senior leaders — former Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and former Education Minister Smriti Irani — to take on the Congress over its suggestion that women’s reservation should be rolled out straight away.”I cannot say that the Congress, which governed the country for decades, does not know the Constitution. But it sure pretends not to know it. The truth is no readjustment of Lok Sabha constituencies is possible without the delimitation process which has been detailed in Articles 81 and 82. This delimitation will now follow the Census. A Delimitation Commission will conduct the exercise based on population data of the ongoing Census and southern states will lose strength compared to the current presence in the Lok Sabha,” Prasad explained.He said the southern states should be ready to face the consequences of their decision to defeat the Constitution 131st Amendment Bill, 2026, which had offered to raise their current Lok Sabha seats by 50 per cent to ensure they do not lose proportional presence in the House due to population reduction.Prasad said the southern states were misled by the Congress on the issue.Responding to Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s suggestion that reservation should be given in the current 543 seats, Prasad explained that there was no logic in readjusting 543 seats today on the basis of the 54 crore population that existed in 1971.”Today India’s population is 140 crore,” Prasad said.His reference was to the number of Lok Sabha seats frozen at 543 (based on the 1971 Census) by a Constitution Amendment Act that came in 2001. That freeze was till 2026 and will not lift, opening the doors for a constitutionally permitted delimitation exercise.Irani, meanwhile, attacked the Congress for celebrating the defeat of a Bill which, she said, would have empowered countless women from ordinary Indian households.”Those who have inherited political representation by dint of belonging to a dynasty can never understand, let alone appreciate, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s move to empower a common Indian woman,” Irani said attacking Priyanka, a Lok Sabha MP from Wayanad.Irani also objected to Priyanka’s remarks that the PM was projecting himself as some kind of an angel to women.”Only those who see political power as entitlement will say that a leader who is empowering citizens is seeking to be their messiah. The reality is the PM is only doing what inclusive democracy demands of a PM and what other governments should have done,” Irani said, accusing the Congress and allies of only “selling the 33 per cent reservation dream to Indian women for three decades without ever actually meaning to pass the law”.