Mounting a scathing attack on the government over its decision to bring the Bills to the House in the middle of Assembly elections, leaders of Opposition parties Thursday accused the BJP of using the plank of reservation of seats for women to push for delimitation of constituencies to seek electoral advantage.
The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill to amend the women’s quota law was introduced in Lok Sabha after a division of votes demanded by the Opposition.
Opposition leaders, including Congress MPs Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Gaurav Gogoi and SP MP Akhilesh Yadav, led the Opposition onslaught, questioning the true intentions of the government and the timing of the Bills.
While reiterating their support for reservation of seats for women in Parliament and Assemblies, Opposition leaders asked why the delimitation process could not be done based on fresh data of the 2026-27 Census.
Vadra and Yadav accused the government of undermining reservation by not finishing the caste Census prior to the delimitation process.
Speaking on the Bills, Vadra pointedly responded to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address, saying that the legislation had nothing to do with women. She alleged the move raised serious concerns about representation and fairness.
Countering the Prime Minister’s claim of a 30-year delay in implementing women quota in Parliament, she drew attention to the 1928 Motilal Nehru report listing 19 fundamental rights, including equal rights for women. She said that while the Prime Minister claims he does not want credit, women cannot be misled. “Baar baar behkaane wale purushon ko mahilaayein jhat se pehchan leti hain (women can quickly identify men who repeatedly mislead),” she said.
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“The Prime Minister’s remarks today suggested that the BJP have been the champions, proponents, and biggest supporters of women’s reservation. This was the theme throughout his speech, even while claiming he didn’t want any credit for it… A few years after reading Rahul Gandhi’s letter in 2023, finally, when the government of respected Prime Minister Narendra Modi unanimously passed this Act in 2023, the Indian National Congress fully supported it, in keeping with its ideology,” she said.
Akhilesh Yadav accused the BJP of “trying to make naari (women) into a nara (slogan)” and demanded that other backward classes (OBC) and Muslim women be given reservation under the provisions of the women’s quota law.
Alleging a “silence” by the BJP on OBC women, he said: “… The rush (to get the Bills passed) is because they (the BJP) don’t want to make any reservation based on the caste census. We will not accept it until it is implemented properly. If we count that OBCs are 66%, then OBC women will be 33%. They don’t want to give rights to OBC women.”
“We are for women’s reservation, but we are against the BJP’s trickery,” Yadav said, adding that he agreed with Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi’s remark that the BJP, through delimitation, was seeking to change the “electoral map of the country”.
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Gogoi , who initiated the debate on behalf of the Opposition, said, “We support women’s reservation in the current strength of House of 543. But you do politics in everything – you do symbolism. This is a backdoor Bill for delimitation, not women’s reservation. You have put a label of women’s reservation on this delimitation.”
K C Venugopal of the Congress accused the government of delaying implementation of the women’s quota law. “The entire Opposition is giving a blank cheque to the government: implement the reservation as per the 2023 law, as per existing strength of the Parliament. Who is opposing it? It is very clear that the government is trying to delay it,” he said.
TMC’s Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar said that if the government was serious about the issue, it would have introduced the Bill during the Budget session and not in the middle of ongoing Assembly elections.
“We are doubting their purpose and intent for doing this in the middle of elections… women’s reservation is a disguise to alter the election process and harm democracy,” she said.
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Congress MP Manish Tewari pointed out inconsistencies in the Bill. Speaking on the delimitation process, he said the process is always that the Census is conducted, delimitation done, and then the number of seats adjusted.
“It has never happened that you do it based on 15-year-old outdated data. The demographic profile of India has changed a lot between 2011 and 2026,” he said. The new Bills, he said, remove constitutional safeguards by allowing Lok Sabha to decide which Census would be used. Arvind Sawant of Shiv Sena (UBT) questioned the government on non-implementation of the 2023 Act passed for women’s reservation and not following due process. “Why are you not implementing the Act based on the current strength of the Lok Sabha?” he said.
