Shikha Mukerjee | Can United Opp. Force PM To Pause Women Bill Rush?

Political parties are all agreed that the 106th Constitution Amendment bill altering the provisions of Article 334 and including a clause (Article 334-A) to enable one-third reservation of seats for women in Parliament and the state Assemblies is the right thing to do. The unanimous passage of the bill confirmed it.

There is speculation that the all-too-obvious hurry by the Narendra Modi government to get the message across that the size of the pie will be bigger and therefore all states will get about the same share as they have now is timed for voting day in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Why the voting days in Kerala and Assam weren’t equally urgent considerations is impossible to explain in rational ways.

The PM’s letter to the political parties is revealing: “This is the right time to turn that aspiration (women’s reservation) into reality.” In other words, he has his compulsions and he is over-eager to get other political parties to bail him out. On his own, Mr Modi cannot pass the required changes to the law; he needs support; hence his appeal to political parties. Does this put the parties in a fix? Or, can they leverage this urgency and postpone the discussion to July?

A new amendment to rush the rollout of women’s reservation in time for the 2029 Lok Sabha elections and all subsequent state elections because, in Mr Modi’s opinion, “the time has now come to implement the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam”, adopted in 2023, is bizarre. Mr Modi may have his imperatives as he has declared in the letter sent to all political parties, but he does not explain why this imperative has to be fulfilled just now. Since he is campaigning hard in West Bengal, he knows the timing of his imperative need to be fulfilled is bang in the middle of elections in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, with a combined population of approximately 17.8 crores, that is about one-eighth of India’s total population.

Senior Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi made a sensible point; there was nothing so urgent about the matter that it must be taken up by extending Parliament’s Budget Session. This would have been just as valid in July, when the Monsoon Session of Parliament is due. Questioning the move, Prof. Zoya Hasan has summarised what the seat reservation law for women will do: “Taken together, women’s reservation, seat expansion and delimitation are not isolated changes; they will jointly reshape who is represented, from where, and in what proportions. Seen in this context, they mark a foundational reordering of the electoral map – one that will redraw constituencies, recalibrate the weight of states, and reconfigure the social composition of legislative bodies. Far from a marginal or technical adjustment, this is a structural shift that could rebalance political power across regions, social groups and genders.”

A structural change of the magnitude that Mr Modi wants to rush into making -- bumping up the number of seats to 816 in the Lok Sabha, up from 543 seats, and reserving one-third of the 816 seats for women -- based on a delimitation of constituencies on population data from 2011, even as the population head count exercise for Census 2026 is underway makes no sense. The 2011 Census data is outdated. The 2026 Census data should be available by 2027, because this time, it will be a digital exercise. The seat freeze on 543 Lok Sabha members was set following the 1971 Census, when India’s population was just about half, 54.8 crores, against an estimated 146 crores in 2026.

Using obsolete data when fresh data will be available soon raises a lot of questions. How does Prime Minister Modi know that 816 seats in the Lok Sabha is the correct number for redrawing the constituency maps and delimitation based on 2011 Census data? Whatever else he knows, on this one he is guessing.

The most frequently cited estimate of a staggering 848 seats is by the Carnegie Foundation, which published a paper on India’s Emerging Crisis of Representation in 2019, based on the principle that no state is to lose representation, as per Article 81, that each state receive seats in proportion to its population and allocate those seats to constituencies of roughly equal size. There have been more recent studies that have indicated India would need 1,600 MPs if each MP represented a million people. The current situation is that each MP represents about 2.5 million people.

There is one upper limit for the Modi government: the new Parliament building accommodates only 888 members in the Lok Sabha. Therefore, the idea of 816 seats is a random number that no one is quite sure how it was determined.

The point is the Modi government’s intentions in avoiding delimitation in the regular way. The process of delimitation is a consultative exercise that takes time, because a Delimitation Commission has to be set up, hearings must be scheduled for political parties and state governments and then drafts have to be prepared, followed by further consultations, and then a final report has to be tabled that will be beyond dispute. Delimitation Commissions are not told to fit the population into pigeonholes of roughly the same size in terms of the number of birds these holes can hold; that was how, however, things were done in the past.

Mr Modi is in a hurry, because he has his own timetable. He wants to bypass the consultations on ushering in momentous structural, social and federal changes that women’s reservation will usher in. The Women’s Reservation Act has not defined how women’s representation will be worked out for the already reserved Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes constituencies. A decision to greatly raise the number of seats will necessarily involve disputes over existing reservation criteria and women’s reservation.

If, as states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala are apprehensive that there will be a decline in the number of Lok Sabha seats, or all the Northeast states, barring Assam, upset that assessments do not indicate an increase in their representation in Parliament, then women, who have been oddly silent, need to make themselves heard.

The delay in initiating the 2021 Census due to the Covid-19 pandemic was understandable. Postponing the Census to 2026 has made things more difficult and politically controversial. It is for the parties in the Opposition and for the BJP, the biggest and dominant party in power, to ensure that reservation for women on the basis of a new delimitation of seats is done with minimum dissatisfaction and maximum consensus.