There is something deeply revealing about the celebration surrounding the proposed implementation of women’s reservation from the next general election. It is being hailed, not without reason, as a long overdue corrective to the chronic underrepresentation of women in India’s legislatures. But beneath the applause lies a disquieting silence—a silence around who these women are likely to be, and more importantly, who they are not.
Let us be clear: a women’s reservation without a quota within quota is not an unalloyed expansion of democracy. It is, at best, a partial measure; at worst, it is a political sleight of hand that risks reinforcing the very hierarchies it claims to challenge.
The Indian State has never been oblivious to the layered nature of inequality. The constitutional commitment to reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes was not born out of charity, but out of an acknowledgment of structural exclusion—centuries of social, economic, educational and political marginalisation that could not be undone by formal equality alone. That logic remains intact today. Yet, when it comes to gender, there is a curious flattening of difference, as though women constitute a homogeneous category with identical experiences and equal access to opportunity.
This is not merely an oversight but a political choice, because the concept of intersectionality, articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw, offers a useful lens here. It tells us that systems of power, patriarchy, caste, class do not operate in isolation. They intersect, overlap and reinforce one another. A Dalit woman does not experience the world in the same way as an upper-caste woman. An Adivasi woman’s political challenges are not reducible to gender alone. To pretend otherwise is to erase lived realities in the name of legislative convenience. And yet, that is precisely what the current framework of women’s reservation threatens to do.
In the absence of a quota within quota, the benefits of reservation are likely to accrue disproportionately to women who are already relatively privileged: upper-caste, urban and often politically connected. The structural barriers that prevent women from marginalised communities from entering politics—lack of resources, social capital, party backing and entrenched caste discrimination—do not magically disappear with the announcement of a gender quota. If anything, they become more pronounced in a competitive environment where the stakes are high and the gatekeepers remain the same.
What we are then left with is a troubling possibility that the banner of ‘women’s empowerment’ may end up masking a consolidation of elite power. This is not a speculative fear; it is borne out by experience. The history of local body reservations offers important lessons. While the introduction of quotas for women in panchayats did increase numerical representation, studies have consistently shown that without adequate safeguards, the benefits often flowed to women from dominant social groups, with marginalised women continuing to face systemic exclusion or acting as proxies for entrenched power structures.
The presence of a woman in office did not automatically translate into the representation of all women. Representation, after all, is not merely about occupying a seat; it is about bringing one’s social location, experiences and priorities into the political arena.
This is why the demand for a quota within quota is not an act of fragmentation, as some critics would have it. It is an attempt to make the promise of representation more meaningful. By ensuring that seats are proportionally reserved for women from SC, ST and other backward classes, the State would be acknowledging a simple but profound truth: that democracy cannot be deepened by ignoring difference, it must be built through it.
Opponents of this idea often invoke the spectre of complexity. They argue that adding sub-quotas would make an already intricate system unwieldy, that it would open the floodgates to endless demands for further segmentation. But this argument collapses under scrutiny. Complexity is not an excuse for injustice.
The Indian Constitution has, time and again, demonstrated an ability to accommodate nuance in the pursuit of equity. The real question, therefore, is not whether such a system is administratively feasible, but whether there is political will to confront entrenched privilege and it is here that the discomfort becomes palpable.
For a quota within quota does more than redistribute seats; it redistributes power. It challenges the monopoly of dominant groups among women. It forces political parties to rethink their candidate selection processes, to move beyond tokenism and to engage with constituencies that have historically been sidelined. It disrupts the convenient narrative of empowerment that does not demand any real sacrifice from those who already hold influence. In other words, it makes equality costly.
But democracy has never been a cost-free enterprise as it demands not just the extension of rights, but the restructuring of power relations. A women’s reservation that sidesteps the question of caste risks becoming a symbolic gesture; one that looks progressive on paper but leaves the deeper architecture of exclusion intact.
There is also a broader political implication to consider. In a society as diverse and stratified as India’s, legitimacy flows from inclusion. If large sections of women particularly those from marginalised communities find themselves excluded from the benefits of reservation, it could erode trust in the very institutions that the reform seeks to strengthen. The narrative of empowerment would ring hollow, and the promise of a more representative democracy would remain unfulfilled.
This is not an argument against women’s reservation. On the contrary, it is an argument for taking it seriously and moves beyond symbolism. To celebrate the proposed Bill without interrogating its design is to settle for a diluted vision of justice. It is to confuse numerical presence with substantive representation and to accept a version of equality that is comfortable, rather than one that is transformative.
The choice before us, therefore, is not between reservation and no reservation, but between a model that merely reshuffles the existing hierarchies and one that genuinely challenges them. If the goal is to democratise political power, then the path is clear. A quota within quota is not a radical demand; it is a logical extension of the principles that have long guided India’s approach to social justice. It is an acknowledgment that representation must be as diverse as the society it seeks to mirror. Anything less would not just be an incomplete reform, but would also be a missed opportunity of historic proportions.
Perhaps more damningly, it would be a reminder that even in moments of apparent progress, the shadow of inequality continues to loom large, shaping outcomes in ways that are as predictable as they are preventable.
Manoj Kumar Jha | Member of Rajya Sabha and national spokesperson, RJD
(Views are personal)