Nearly two and a half years after it got Parliament to pass the Naari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (the Women’s Reservation law) amid the Opposition’s criticism about the indeterminate timeline of the Act’s implementation, the Centre is now in a rush to amend the law to enable an earlier rollout.
On Monday (March 23), Union Home Minister Amit Shah reached out to some Opposition leaders, including AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi, Supriya Sule of the NCP-SP and YSRCP MP Midhun Reddy, with the Centre’s proposal to delink women’s reservation rollout in Lok Sabha and State legislatures from the Census 2027 exercise.
The home minister is learnt to have told the Opposition leaders that the Centre was keen on amending the September 2023 legislation to roll out women’s reservation with the 2029 Lok Sabha polls, if not earlier. The government was also considering another enabling amendment that would increase the total strength of Lok Sabha from the current 543 members to 816 members, with 273 of these members being women, Shah told the Opposition MPs.
Also read: Explained: Features, timelines, other details of Nari Shakti Bill
Later in the evening, Shah also met floor leaders of all NDA constituents to inform them of the Centre’s plan to move the two Amendment Bills in the ongoing budget session of Parliament. Sources said that irrespective of the stand taken by the Opposition parties on Shah’s proposal, the Union Cabinet is expected to give its nod to the two Bills this week and the proposed amendments may be introduced in Parliament as early as Friday (March 27) since the ongoing Budget session is set to conclude next week on April 2.
Sources in the government and the Opposition confirmed that “informal discussions” between leaders from both sides had happened on the Centre’s proposal over the past month, but a consensus remained elusive. On Monday, most constituents of the Opposition’s INDIA bloc, including the Congress party, “stayed away” from the talks initiated by Shah.
Opposition flags lack of consultation
A senior Congress MP told The Federal that before Parliament reconvened on March 9 following its mid-session recess, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had reminded Shah and Union Parliamentary Affairs minister Kiren Rijiju that his party had demanded an “early and definite timeline” for roll out of women’s reservation “when the Bill was brought to Parliament through a special session”. Kharge, it is learnt, had urged for an all-party meeting to be called to “discuss in a transparent manner what amendments the Centre is proposing now” to the law that was “hurriedly enacted” in September 2023.
The Union home minister, however, decided against heeding Kharge’s suggestion of convening an all-party meeting. Instead, sources said Shah may individually reach out to Kharge and leaders of other INDIA bloc parties to build consensus on the Centre’s ambitious move.
A non-Congress Opposition MP told The Federal that Shah is “averse to calling an all-party meeting because he wants to, perhaps, prevent the INDIA bloc from coming to the table with a joint strategy on the matter”. The timing and motivation of the Centre’s sudden push for an early rollout of women’s reservation “are highly suspect”, this MP said, adding that the government had stridently “brushed aside Opposition’s questions about the lack of a definite timeline when the Bill was first passed in Parliament by consensus”.
Three key questions
It may be recalled that when the Naari Shakti Bill was brought to Parliament, through a special session, in September 2023, Opposition parties led by the Congress – the INDIA bloc was still taking shape then – had pointedly demanded three answers from the Centre.
First, since the Bill proposed that the reservation rollout would happen after delimitation of constituencies following the latest Census (there was no clarity at the time on when the next Census, pending since 2021, would be conducted), the Opposition had questioned the government on why it was linking the women quota to delimitation.
Also read: Women quota bill: First step done, but for NDA, several hurdles remain
Second, Opposition parties, particularly the Congress, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), had demanded a “quota within quota” for women belonging to the OBC communities.
Lastly, the Opposition had asked the Centre to commit to a clear timeline for implementation of women’s reservation, which they said was “indeterminate” under the current law since there was no clarity on when the next Census would take place and when the Delimitation Commission would be set up.
Some questions answered
After a gap of two and a half years, the Centre finally seeks to address at least two of these three concerns. Sources say the Centre wants the law suitably amended to ensure that the quota rollout happens ahead of the next Lok Sabha polls. Some in the BJP are already speculating that if the amendments clear Parliament in the ongoing session, the subsequent administrative processes may be expedited to ensure that at least a “basic framework for implementing reservation” is ready before the high-stakes Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls that are due early next year.
A senior BJP minister said that since the Election Commission had already started a pan-India special intensive revision of electoral rolls, “a fair idea of the voting population and its gender break-up will be available much before final figures for Census 2027 are tabulated”.
“I think that at least directionally this is the data, juxtaposed with the overall population data from the 2011 Census, which the government and the EC may take as the base figures for an early rollout because waiting for the final figures of Census 2027 may not be feasible if they want a countrywide reservation rollout in the 2029 Lok Sabha polls”.
Delimitation concerns and assurances
On delimitation, the Centre, say sources, is hoping to kill two birds with one stone. Among the proposals that the Centre is willing to consider is to implement women’s reservation after amending the relevant laws to increase the Lok Sabha’s strength to 816 MPs while keeping the ‘percentage representation’ that each state currently has in the Lower House unchanged.
Several states, particularly Opposition-ruled Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana and even Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, have been vociferously opposed to linking the delimitation exercise with their share in India’s total population. Parties like MK Stalin’s DMK have constantly argued that linking delimitation with population would be akin to penalising states like Tamil Nadu for ensuring family planning, while rewarding states like UP and Bihar with an even higher representation in Parliament for continuing to have high rates of population growth.
Also read: Elections 2026: Despite its progressive image, Kerala lags in women’s representation
Shah’s offer to the Opposition, thus, is meant to allay fears of parties like the DMK while simultaneously securing safe passage for the government’s bid to rollout women’s reservation; the electoral dividends of which the BJP can then hope to reap in subsequent elections. As such, what the Centre is offering is that while delimitation would still be required to reserve constituencies for women – it is as yet unclear if the Centre wants this reservation to be applicable on a fixed or rotational basis – the percentage of seats that each state currently has in the Lok Sabha will continue to be the same.
OBC quota hurdle
The government, however, is unlikely to concede the Opposition’s third demand of introducing an OBC quota within the 33 per cent women’s quota. A senior Samajwadi Party MP told The Federal that this is, arguably, “part of the reason why the Centre wants to rush through these amendments right now and not wait for the new Census figures because the 2027 Census is going to have caste enumeration also and once the caste figures are out, it will be impossible for the Centre to deny quota within quota for OBC women.”
Also read: How Census 2027 could alter India’s political landscape
The Samajwadi MP said that Shah had not yet spoken formally to SP chief Akhilesh Yadav or any other senior leader from the party about the proposed amendments but added that “we will put across our view if they (the government) talk to us and we will raise it in Parliament also to expose the dirty tricks they are trying to play”.
Political compulsion for Opposition
Sources in the Opposition said that supporting the Centre’s bid to amend the laws for an earlier reservation rollout is a “political and electoral compulsion” for their parties.
“We know that (Prime Minister) Narendra Modi and Amit Shah want to do this for their own electoral agenda but we can’t oppose the amendments because then we will be branded as anti-women,” a woman Lok Sabha MP from the Congress said while adding, “the best we can hope to do is to keep up pressure on the government about introducing an OBC quota within quota, reminding the people that it was our party that had first brought women’s reservation in panchayats and local bodies and that we will continue to demand accountability and transparency from the Modi government on implementation of reservation in Lok Sabha and State legislatures till it becomes a reality”.
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