The Centre may not push through amendments to the Naari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, 2023, — the women’s reservation law — in the ongoing budget session of Parliament, which is scheduled to conclude on April 2.
With just four more sittings left before the session ends and the Opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) bloc not on board for rushing the proposed amendments, the government could either call for a special session or wait for the monsoon session later in the year to make changes to the key law.
Govt keen to amend women reservation law
The Centre wants to amend the women’s reservation law passed in September 2023 through a special parliamentary session to speed up the implementation of a 33 per cent quota in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies.
It aims to do so by delinking the exercise from the current legislative requirement of fresh Census data and the constitution of a delimitation commission.
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The law passed two-and-a-half years ago had been sharply criticised by the Opposition for the indeterminate timeline of making women’s reservation a reality. As per the 2023 law, the reservation rollout would take place as per the recommendations of a delimitation commission, set up after the first Census conducted after 2026 (there is a freeze on delimitation till 2026; ordinarily, the first Census after 2026 would have been in 2031, but in the current scenario it’s 2027).
It may be recalled that when the law was enacted, there was no clarity on when the Centre would initiate the next Census exercise, which has been pending since 2021. Though the 2023 law was passed unanimously by both Houses of Parliament, sundry Opposition leaders had, at the time, slammed the Centre for enacting a law whose implementation had no fixed timeline. The Opposition had urged the government then to delink the law’s implementation from the delimitation exercise.
Govt started reaching out to Opposition parties
Earlier this month, the Centre began reaching out to Opposition parties to build a consensus on advancing the timeline for introducing 33 per cent reservation for women in Lok Sabha and state legislatures. The Centre’s offer was to use data from the 2011 Census for a delimitation exercise to reserve seats for women, while simultaneously also increasing the strength of the Lok Sabha by 50 per cent — from its current bench-strength of 543 MPs to 816 MPs.
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The Opposition, which agreed in principle with the need for an earlier rollout of women’s reservation consistent with the demands it had made in September 2023, however, is learnt to have told the Centre that all aspects of the amendments proposed to the parent law must first be discussed with its leaders.
‘Weapon of mass diversion’
On Wednesday (March 25) morning, Jairam Ramesh, chief whip of the Congress party in Rajya Sabha, likened the Centre’s sudden proposal to amend the women’s reservation law to a “weapon of mass diversion”, while reminding Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government that when the law was introduced in September 2023, the Congress had had demanded “immediate implementation from the 2024 Lok Sabha elections itself”.
A day earlier, Rajya Sabha’s Leader of Opposition and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had also written to Centre, on behalf of the INDIA bloc, demanding that an all-party meeting must first be convened by the government to discuss the proposed amendments to the 2023 Act, following which the changes can be moved in Parliament at a session convened after the upcoming Assembly polls in Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry concluded.
Increasing sizes of Lok Sabha, state legislatures
Reiterating this stand of the Opposition, on Wednesday, Ramesh said that the Centre’s plan to “increase the size of the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabhas by 50 per cent” also needs “careful deliberation”.
Also read: Centre to amend Women’s Reservation law; Shah reaches out to Opposition
The proposal to increase the number of seats in the Lok Sabha following delimitation was always going to be a prickly issue for the Centre. As reported earlier, it was willing to consider implementing women’s reservation after amending the relevant laws and the Constitution 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.
Opposition-ruled states object
Several states, particularly the Opposition-ruled Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana and even Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, have been vociferously opposed to delimitation purely on the basis of population as they fear they would lose out on their share of representation and say in the Lok Sabha to states such as UP and Bihar that have massive populations.
Parties such as Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) have constantly argued that linking delimitation with population would be akin to penalising states such as Tamil Nadu, which it rules, for ensuring family planning, while rewarding UP and Bihar with an even higher representation in Parliament for continuing to have high rates of population growth.
The Centre’s offer to increase the Lok Sabha’s strength based on the percentage of seats each state currently has in the Lower House is meant to allay fears of parties like the DMK, while simultaneously securing safe passage for the government’s bid to roll out women’s reservation, the electoral dividends of which the Bharatiya Janata Party can then hope to reap in subsequent elections.
With the Opposition united in its demand for consensus on the proposed amendments and for getting them enacted in a later session of Parliament, and not much time left before the ongoing budget session concludes, the Centre seems to have relented for now.
Other Bills await clearance
What seems to have also pushed the government to hold back is that the Finance Bill is yet to be cleared by Parliament — it was passed in Lok Sabha on Wednesday and is expected to be returned to the Lower House by the Rajya Sabha on March 27 when Parliament meets next, following the holiday on March 26 for Ram Navami.
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The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Bill and the Central Armed Police Forces (General Administration) Bill, introduced in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, respectively, on Wednesday, also have to be discussed and passed by both Houses next week.
This would leave no time for the Centre to introduce the amendments to the women’s reservation law and related amendments to the Constitution in the ongoing session and have them passed following the detailed discussion that the Opposition wants on the proposed changes.
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