The elephant in the room is reservation for women of one-third seats in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies as well as the National Capital Region post the expiry of the 2026 deadline. The current wrangling over delimitation is not limited to ‘freeze or increase’ in the number of seats whenever the 5th Delimitation Commission is set up, which by law requires a census to be held first.
Implementing women’s reservation in representation was put off in 2023 when the 106th constitutional amendment was adopted following the passage of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, otherwise referred to as the Women’s Reservation Act, on the entirely legitimate plea that it would have to be done on the basis of a full-fledged delimitation exercise. Be that as it may, that argument, however, was overturned in the case of delimitation of constituencies for the Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.
The expansion of reservation of constituencies to create a new category-- women--requires a follow-through under the terms of the 2023. Freeze or increase, however the legislation establishing the Delimitation Commission is framed, one-third of all elected legislative seats, that is seats in the Lok Sabha, all the state assemblies, and the National Capital Region, will have to be assigned to women.
The brawl over delimitation, how it will impact states that have succeeded in slowing population growth—whether it will be a penalty or a reward—is edging towards the centre-stage in national politics. The unanimous silence on how women’s reservation will work out under these circumstances indicates a reluctance to address the issue.
Unanimity seems to be there on how the political class chooses to work on women’s reservation. There was near unanimity among parties that ensured the passing of the Women’s Reservation Act and the 106th amendment. Curiously enough, there seems to be an identical unanimity, a sort of unspoken consensus, that the follow through action required to implement it shall not be discussed.
Having succeeded in making a paradigmatic shift in India’s parliamentary politics, neither the Narendra Modi government nor the other parties in parliament that joined in sharing the credit for passing the law, seem to want to talk about it.
If the Modi government, with its overall majority of seats through the National Democratic Alliance, decides to continue with the freeze and maintain the total number of elected seats in the Lok Sabha at 543, even then, there will have to be a delimitation exercise, because of the women’s reservation law. Since the law states, as of now, that reservation will be for a limited 15-year period, which works out to three rotations of constituencies that will be exclusively contested by women, the delimitation exercise cannot be short-circuited.
Were the freeze put in place by the 84th amendment to continue beyond 2026, when the issue needs to be addressed by parliament, even then there would have to be a delimitation exercise. Marking out 131 parliamentary constituencies exclusively for women is a mathematically complicated exercise, because proportionality will have to be maintained when the seats to be reserved for women are identified. How will states that have less than three seats in the Lok Sabha resolve the math?
Reservation for women will kick off a whole new ball game if the Modi regime proposes, as most political parties seem to believe it will, a big increase in the number of seats in the Lok Sabha which would also mean a major change in all elected state assembly sizes. If the number of seats goes up to anywhere between 700 and 848, as many experts speculate, then women’s reservation poses an enormous challenge to the way the politics, the selection of candidates, and the monopolisation of power has been hitherto restricted to a predominantly male elite.
In the current Lok Sabha, out of the total elected 543 seats, women hold a mere 74 seats. Trinamool Congress has 11 women members of parliament, out of its 29 seats. That works out to a 37.9 percent weightage.
If the freeze continues, then the number of women represented as a category would go up to 181 seats from 74. If there is an increase in the total number of Lok Sabha seats as is being speculated, then political parties would have to step up to the challenge, since the total number of reserved seats for women would go up to 233 seats. In case of an increase in the number of seats to 848 or thereabouts, then reserved seats for women would zoom to 282.
The empowerment of women through reservation may not immediately alter the fundamental inequality embedded in the social and political system, where women function in mostly “passive dependent” mode, as an “adaptive preference” as pointed out by philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who worked with Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen on social choice and women.
The emergence of ‘panchayat-pati’ (husband of a woman panchayat pradhan, elected under the reservation of constituencies system for panchayati raj institutions) is a reflection of how the social system has enforced male dominance by stripping women of power. The state-by-state variations, and the different degrees by which patriarchy usurps women’s power as representatives, indicate that reservation per se will not work like magic to make Indian law-making and budget allocations significantly different.
The law, however, is the law. It has to be implemented. Postponing it will not change the law. It will merely brand those who did not implement it as cowards.
Shikha Mukerjee
Senior journalist based in Kolkata
(Views are perosnal)
(s_mukerjee@yahoo.com)