On 16 April 2026, Parliament is set to discuss changes to the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, also known as the Women’s Reservation Act 2023, which will allow for one-third of seats to be reserved for women in the Union legislature by March 2029 and in state assemblies that hold elections after that. The air around the debate is euphoric. Yet the significance of this moment cannot be understood by merely looking to it as a current legislative event. Instead, it ought to be placed within the framework of India’s constitutional journey. The Constituent Assembly examined the question of women's equality with greater seriousness than is often remembered. Its debates reveal that women in free India did not seek token privileges or polite concessions. In fact, they sought genuine equality of status, justice, and the right to shoulder responsible work in the service of the nation. That is why, unlike many Western democracies, India did not proceed through the idea of graded citizenship for women and instead introduced genuine political equality in one constitutional stroke.
A comparison with the evolution of women's political rights in the UK makes the decisions of the assembly starker. While political equality in the UK evolved incrementally, beginning with the Reform Act of 1832 and widening in stages through 1867, 1884, and 1918, leading to universal adult suffrage in 1928, the Constituent Assembly in India did not endorse the idea that political rights could be granted gradually according to education, property, sex, social status, standing, or ethnic identities. It instead decided, at the founding moments itself, in favour of universal adult suffrage, resting it on the essential democratic belief that people’s voice, and not their social condition, identity, or inherited position, is the first condition of justice in a republic.
Women’s political claims in India, therefore, were not deferred demands. They were inscribed in the moral consciousness of the republic at its birth. The Assembly believed that once women were recognized as equal citizens and voters, their voice would, over time, mature into an agency role within the institutions of power. Political equality in voting was expected to generate political equality in lawmaking. That faith was morally profound, but in hindsight, it proved too optimistic, as it overlooked the persistence of patriarchy, which accepts formal equality on paper while obstructing real autonomy in practice. It can accept women as voters while resisting them as legislators. It can celebrate women as symbols of the nation while keeping the commanding heights of politics male-dominated, thereby undermining their actual influence and decision-making power in governance. The distance between voice and agency lies precisely here.
B.R. Ambedkar’s warning in his closing speech at the constitution's inauguration that India was entering an “age of contradictions" is still pertinent in this context. Political equality was expected to obliterate deep social inequality in our democratic life. One person, one vote, and one value was expected to dissolve the hierarchies embedded in society, yet, in reality, it has only exposed the tension between constitutional promise and social power. Patriarchy is one of the clearest manifestations of that contradiction. Women have voted in equal numbers, of late, in greater numbers than men, but parties have consistently denied them proportionate tickets, institutions continue to exclude them from leadership positions, and society still sees them as dependents rather than decision-makers.
From a normative standpoint, this distinction is decisive. Democracy is not exhausted by the existence of the franchise. The right to vote is indispensable, but it is only the beginning of equality. To vote is to possess a voice in choosing rulers. To sit in legislatures is to possess agency in shaping law and giving direction to the republic. If women are equal only at the point of voting but not at the point of governing, democratic equality remains morally unfinished. Arguably, it underlines the limits of procedural equality by conflating formal symmetry with justice and ignoring that procedures operate within a social context. They are instead mediated by entrenched prejudices, unequal access to resources, patriarchal gatekeeping, and party structures built around male control. In such a setting, formally equal rules can repeatedly yield unequal outcomes. Procedure, then, tends to shield injustice rather than correct it.
That is what has happened over decades. Women in India have been central to democracy as voters, campaigners, mobilizers, and participants in public life, yet they have remained strikingly underrepresented in Parliament and in the state assemblies. The failure does not indicate women’s civic capabilities are lacking. Rather, it is the failure of the political system to convert women’s presence in democracy into women’s authority within democracy. Parties across ideological lines have too often treated women less as bearers of agency and more as constituencies to be managed. They have been approached as recipients of welfare, as disciplined voting blocs, and as targets of schemes, subsidies, and patronage. This has created a politics of instrumental rationality, in which women are recognized as subjects of governance but not fully embraced as participants in government. Welfare may ease burdens, but it cannot by itself bestow agency.
Policy's attention to women matters, but it must be realized that governance for women is not the same as governance with women. This is precisely why the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam is historically significant, for it shifts the democratic imagination from protection to participation, from welfare to representation, and from symbolic respect to institutional power. Prime Minister Modi has aptly called the Act the "need of the hour" for a more dynamic democracy, and an homage to women's resiliency and a part of a bigger movement towards women-led development for better governance. The moral punch is clear, women cannot remain merely passive beneficiaries of policy, they must be equal makers of law as well.
The Women's Reservation Act is undeniably the most substantive step in independent India toward women’s political empowerment. It is not a sectional privilege. It is a democratic correction. Women are present across caste, class, religion, and region. Expanding their legislative presence therefore deepens the representativeness of the republic itself. It is a genuine push for participatory governance that transcends social cleavages, identities, hierarchies, and divisions, ensuring that women's voices and perspectives are included in decision-making processes at all levels of government.
The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam actually complements, rather than deviates from, the constitutional vision of our founding fathers. It actually completes it. The founders were right in entrusting women with the vote in one stroke. Where the early republic fell short was in assuming that voice would automatically become agency. It did not sufficiently anticipate how patriarchy would turn formally equal citizens into politically manageable subjects, leading to a situation where women's voices were heard but their agency remained constrained in practice. Arguably the Act is in sync with the aspirations of Viksit Bharat. A developed India cannot be built while half its population remains underrepresented in institutions of law-making. Women stood at the center of Gandhi’s mass movements during the struggle for freedom, and women stand at the center of Modi’s vision for 2047. There is continuity in the fact that both Gandhi and Modi came from Gujarat: each understood that no national transformation can be complete if women remain at the margins of political power.
The case for the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam is simple but profound. The republic gave women a voice at its founding. Patriarchy ensured that voice did not adequately translate into agency, resulting in systemic barriers that have historically limited women's participation in decision-making processes. Democracy now has an obligation to correct that failure. The true promise of equality is not merely that women should help choose power, but that they should equally share in exercising it. It is indeed a testament to PM Modi’s evocative, passionate and just call for a “Naya Bharat”. As PM Modi has rightly put it, operationalising the bill is no longer a political issue, it is a national duty.
Kiran Choudhry till recently, was a BJP member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha). Hena Singh is a professor of political science at Miranda House, University of Delhi. Views of authors are personal.