By K C Monnappa
India is the world’s largest democracy, yet only about 14 percent of its Lok Sabha members are women. In a country where women constitute nearly half the population, cast roughly half the votes, and increasingly lead households, businesses, and even defence missions, this number is not merely a statistic. It is an indictment. The 106th Constitutional Amendment, passed with near-unanimous fanfare in September 2023 and popularly known as the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, was supposed to change that forever. It promised 33 per cent reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies. Yet here we are in April 2026, in the middle of a specially convened three-day Parliamentary session, and the bill meant to make that reservation a reality has just failed to secure the two-thirds majority required for a constitutional amendment. The 131st Amendment Bill, the government’s implementation vehicle, was defeated in the Lok Sabha, 298 in favour, 230 against, well short of the 352 needed. The Delimitation Bill and the Union Territories Amendment Bill that rode alongside it were subsequently withdrawn. The curtain has fallen on another act of a very long and very dispiriting play.
The idea of reserving a third of parliamentary seats for women is not new. It was first mooted in 1996 as the 81st Constitutional Amendment Bill under the United Front government of H.D. Deve Gowda, and promptly collapsed without being passed. It was reintroduced in 1997 and 1998, each time lapsing with the dissolution of the Lok Sabha. Under Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA government, it was raised again without success. In 2010, when the Rajya Sabha finally passed the Women’s Reservation Bill under Manmohan Singh’s UPA government, there was cautious celebration. But the Lok Sabha never took it up, and it lapsed again. The bill’s graveyard stretched across nearly three decades and six distinct governments, each citing different reasons for failure but producing identical outcomes for women. From the very beginning, the reservation bill attracted a peculiar coalition of opponents: male politicians who feared losing their seats, parties worried about caste arithmetic being upset, and ideologues who argued, with varying degrees of sincerity, that reserved seats would produce proxy women legislators controlled by their male relatives. Mulayam Singh Yadav’s notorious 2010 objection, suggesting that reservations would lead to wolf-whistling in Parliament, captured the most grotesque end of this resistance, but the substance of political anxiety ran deeper and wider than such rhetoric.
In September 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government did what no government before it had managed: it passed the Women’s Reservation Bill through both Houses of Parliament with overwhelming support, 454 votes in favour and just 2 against in the Lok Sabha, and 214 in favour with none against in the Rajya Sabha. President Droupadi Murmu signed it into law on September 28, 2023. The law reserves one-third of Lok Sabha seats for women, including a sub-quota for women from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and sets a 15-year sunset clause on the reservation. But the government included a critical condition buried in the law’s provisions: the reservation would come into force only after the completion of a fresh delimitation exercise, which in turn would occur only after the publication of a new national census. With no census having been conducted since 2011, the 2021 census having been indefinitely postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and administrative delays, the gateway to implementation remained firmly shut. The law’s gazette notification was delayed for over two and a half years, finally issued on April 16, 2026, the very eve of the special Parliamentary session where the government sought to push through its implementation framework. Critics were quick to note the optics: a government notifying a law at midnight to create political theatre, even as it knew its own bills would face fierce opposition the next morning.
The Modi government’s April 2026 strategy was ambitious. Rather than simply implementing the 2023 Act, it sought to fundamentally reshape India’s electoral architecture. Three bills were introduced on April 16. First, the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, proposed increasing the Lok Sabha’s strength from the current 543 seats to 850. Second, the Delimitation Bill, 2026, sought to enable a fresh delimitation of constituencies based on the 2011 census, rather than waiting for the 2027 census that has been scheduled. Third, the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill extended these changes to Delhi, Puducherry, and Jammu & Kashmir. The government’s logic had surface coherence. The 2023 Act requires delimitation before reservation can operate. Delimitation requires a census. Since the next census is only due in 2027 and its results would not be available before the 2029 general elections, waiting meant women’s reservation could not apply until 2034 at the earliest. To break this deadlock, the government proposed using the 2011 census data for delimitation and simultaneously expanding the Lok Sabha so that no state would lose seats, only gain them. Home Minister Amit Shah argued that this expansion was the only fair way to accommodate both the demographic realities revealed by the 2011 census and the constitutional mandate for proportional representation, while ensuring that the southern states that had successfully controlled their populations did not pay a political price for their developmental achievement.
The opposition’s rejection was neither uniform nor entirely principled, but its core arguments deserved engagement. The INDIA bloc’s central demand was unimpeachable in isolation: implement reservation immediately on the existing 543 seats without tying it to delimitation. Congress’s K.C. Venugopal put it plainly, withdraw the 131st Amendment Bill, call an all-party meeting, and the opposition would support full implementation on the current House. This had real constitutional merit: the 2023 Act requires delimitation, not a larger Parliament. The second argument concerned caste justice. Rahul Gandhi and Samajwadi Party’s Dimple Yadav argued that without an explicit sub-quota for OBC women, reservation would disproportionately benefit upper-caste women with greater access to education and political networks. India’s experience with women’s reservation in panchayats supports this concern, numerical representation often masks caste capture. The failure to include an OBC sub quota was a substantive gap the government chose not to address, handing the opposition a legitimate grievance. The third argument was federal. Under strict proportional representation using 2011 census data, southern states with lower population growth would lose seats to the Hindi heartland. Independent estimates suggested Tamil Nadu could lose 11 seats, Kerala 8, Andhra Pradesh 5, while Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan gained. The BJP’s Tejasvi Surya countered that expansion to 850 seats ensures every state gains in absolute terms. But the opposition correctly noted that proportional share, not absolute count, determines federal leverage in coalition politics, budget negotiations, and administrative appointments. A smaller slice of a larger pie is still a smaller slice. Finally, the opposition raised a procedural objection that transcended partisan interest: decisions of this magnitude—restructuring Parliament, redrawing thousands of constituencies, fundamentally altering the federal balance—warrant standing committee scrutiny and broad consultation, not a three-day special session.
The government’s fundamental error was conflating three distinct policy questions—women’s reservation, delimitation, and Lok Sabha expansion—into a single take-it-or-leave-it package. Each is consequential enough to warrant separate legislation and separate political mandates. By bundling them, the government manufactured the very opposition it publicly lamented. The honest path was available and was not taken. The overdue census should have been conducted immediately after the 2024 elections. Women’s reservation should have been implemented on the existing 543 seats as an interim arrangement, the law, properly read, does not require the Parliament to be larger, only to be delimited. The OBC sub-quota should have been included in 2023 itself, foreclosing the opposition’s most principled objection. And delimitation, a constitutional obligation that cannot be avoided forever, should have been built through genuine cross-party consensus, not bundled with a women’s bill to serve as political cover. The opposition, too, has sins to account for. The demand for immediate implementation on 543 seats was correct. But several INDIA bloc members signalled resistance to any delimitation under any circumstances, which is constitutionally untenable. Delimitation is not optional; the dispute is about timing and methodology, not whether it should happen at all. Perhaps most damning is the arithmetic the government walked into knowingly. The NDA held 292 seats. A constitutional amendment required 362. No serious political strategist could have expected this to pass without significant cross-party support, which no one had attempted to build. Which raises an uncomfortable question that hangs over this entire exercise: was passage ever the actual goal, or was forcing the opposition to vote against women’s reservation the political objective all along?
The ledger of losses from this episode is instructive. The clearest losers are Indian women, particularly from marginalised communities. Women’s absence from Parliament is not politically neutral, it shapes budgets, welfare policy, and laws governing marriage, property, and safety. Every year of delay compounds that democratic deficit. The government also loses, not immediately but over time. It had an opportunity to cement a genuine legacy on women’s empowerment. Instead, it is left with a law on the books with no implementation date and an opposition that has successfully repositioned itself as the champion of women’s interests. PM Modi’s 2023 warning that those opposing the bill would pay a heavy price may yet prove ironic. And Indian democracy itself is a loser. A constitutional amendment that required consensus was deployed as a political manoeuvre. The idea that certain questions, like women’s equal participation in governance, should transcend partisan advantage has been further eroded. That erosion is the most durable damage of all.
India’s women have been asked to wait before. They waited through Deve Gowda’s government, through Vajpayee’s, through Manmohan Singh’s. They waited through the 2023 Act’s passage and through its two-year gazette notification delay. They are waiting still. The argument for women’s political representation needs no further validation from electoral mathematics or parliamentary strategy. It is a matter of elementary democratic justice. The only honest question before Parliament is not whether women deserve reservation, but why a nation that unanimously agrees they do keeps finding reasons to postpone the reckoning. Until that question is answered, not in speeches but in implementation, every special session and every presidential assent and every gazette notification is merely theatrics. And the audience, which is to say the women of India, deserves considerably better than this.
