On Friday, 17 April 2026, the Narendra Modi government placed before Parliament the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, an act of political courage and constitutional vision designed to operationalise the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam at last. By expanding the Lok Sabha to 850 seats and aligning women’s 33% reservation with a fresh delimitation, it would have translated the 2023 Act, notified on 16 April 2026, from a promise on paper into a lived reality at the 2029 general election. It was thwarted. A united opposition led by the Congress, and joined by the DMK, the Trinamool Congress and the Samajwadi Party, withheld the two-thirds majority required and denied India’s women the pathway through which their constitutional right could actually be exercised. Having championed women’s rights globally through UN Women for seven foundational years and led the campaign for gender parity in political leadership, I write from a place of profound disappointment. But not despair. The question is not whether India will complete this circle. It is only how many more women will be asked to wait, and who will be held to account in the court of public opinion.
The onus is now unambiguous. The Congress party, which led the Opposition bloc, has placed itself at the head of every significant attempt to defer women’s reservation in 30 years of Indian parliamentary history. The party that allowed the Bill to lapse through the United Front years, that watched it die in committee during the UPA years, dealt a blow, that too triumphantly. What is said and what is done do not cohere, and the hypocrisy is no longer deniable. Congress owes Indian women a frank accounting of its record, not another smokes and mirrors show. This applies to the other parties that joined the Congress. The Samajwadi Party’s participation was, if dispiriting, unsurprising from a formation whose public vocabulary toward women has long carried the unmistakable texture of misogyny. The DMK’s opposition was perhaps also to be expected. But how could the Trinamool Congress? West Bengal stood to gain additional seats under the 131st Amendment. A woman Chief Minister, who speaks to women’s empowerment at every electoral opportunity, chose to vote against a reform that would have expanded her state’s representation and the political voice of Bengal’s women in the same instrument. An Opposition divided on nearly every issue of national life suddenly rediscovered its unity for a single purpose, to keep Indian women out of one-third of their own Parliament.
Had the Bill passed, it would have been the largest legislative victory for Indian women in the republic’s history, and the most consequential structural reform in Indian democracy since universal adult franchise. It would have made a critical mass of women’s representation in Parliament a constitutional right, not a political concession extended at the whim of patriarchal party leaders masquerading as sympathisers of women’s rights. It would have redeemed the civilisational values India has always claimed, the Tridevis, Nari Shakti, and Ardhanarishwar, which recognise not merely equal humanity but equal divinity between women and men. It would have extended to the apex of the democratic pyramid the same logic already proven at its base, where over three million women representatives serve under the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments.
Why is such a structural intervention needed? Because structural exclusion does not self-correct. Nearly eighty years after Independence, women’s representation in the Lok Sabha stands at approximately 14%. Half the country holds a seventh of its legislative voice. Justice delayed is justice denied, and for Indian women it has been both, repeatedly and deliberately. India’s Constitution, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women which India has ratified, both mandate the end-state. A critical mass of 33% is the minimum intervention that international evidence and Indian panchayat experience both confirm will shift institutional culture toward genuine parity.
The gains would have travelled far beyond women themselves. Political empowerment has a cascading effect. It is the gateway through which economic and social empowerment become structurally durable. When women hold one-third of the seats in bodies that allocate budgets, write laws, and set national priorities, the gains compound across generations. Legislatures with substantial women’s representation demonstrably reprioritise public policy toward health, education, child welfare, and the long-horizon investments short electoral cycles tend to neglect. This is not identity politics. It is governance quality. The woman who understands what it is to have a daughter forced to drop out of school, to run a small enterprise refused a bank loan, jisko kaada chubhta hai usi ko pata hai ki kya hota hai, will bring that lived knowledge to the writing of laws.
The delimitation-linked design, which the Opposition has sought to paint as a flaw, is in fact the single most intelligent feature of the reform. By expanding the Lok Sabha to 850 seats, it removes the zero-sum trigger: the reservation comes from a larger pie, not by displacing existing representatives. Every state gains. The five southern states move from 129 seats to 195, from 23.76% of the House to 23.87%, their relative weight preserved and their absolute voice grown. Tamil Nadu moves from 39 to approximately 59; Karnataka from 28 to 42; Kerala from 20 to 30. What is visible is an Opposition so unwilling to share even a third of an expanded Parliament with women that it has blocked the very path to 2029.
There is a pattern here. It is called displacement. Every time women’s reservation has approached enactment, a new procedural objection has surfaced to defer it. The stated reasons have changed each time. The intent has not. In the 1990s and 2000s the pretext was sub-quotas, reservation within reservation for OBC and Muslim women, framed as enhancement and designed to paralyse, resurrected on Friday as if three years of settled consensus had never occurred. In the 2020s the pretext became procedure. The divide-and-rule grammar that fragments Indian women rather than recognising them as a single constituency is the same grammar that has denied them representation for 30 years. The denial mentality (mansikta) has not changed. A further layer of the same tactic surfaced through rural-urban and class-based objections: the claim that reservation will benefit only urban or privileged women. None of this has any factual basis. The deepest reservoir from which the reserved seats will draw is precisely the thirty lakh women already serving in panchayats and municipalities, overwhelmingly rural, overwhelmingly from modest backgrounds, their governance apprenticeship already served. If any party wishes to field more OBC women, or Muslim women, that choice remains with each party, every election. To hold the entire Bill hostage on that pretext is to amputate it.
Two hundred and fifty million Indian women are aged 18 to 35 today. They have grown up in an India where girls outpace boys in school enrolment, where women lead Chandrayaan missions, fly fighter aircraft, command naval vessels. Their mothers and grandmothers watched the reservation debated, diluted and deferred for thirty years. Friday’s vote pushes their enfranchisement past the 2029 general election. Every month of delay is another cohort of Indian women asked to wait.
Against this history, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party have held a consistent and courageous line, and the sincerity of that commitment must be defended against those who suggest it is a performance. It is not. The journey from the 2014 manifesto, through the 2023 passage of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam under the Prime Minister’s personal championship, through the 16 April 2026 notification and the 17 April operationalisation attempt, is a record of innate belief, not electoral expediency. Gender justice is rooted in this Prime Minister’s civilisational understanding that women and men are equal in humanity and in divinity, and in the operating credo of his governance, women-led development, consecrated onto the global stage at India’s G20 presidency in 2023. There will be no Viksit Bharat by 2047 without women leading at every level. Half the population cannot be asked to build half a country.
The constitutional text now stands and cannot be unwritten. The 2023 Act has guaranteed Indian women de jure equality in representation. The transition to de facto equality has been thwarted, but not prevented. The 131st Amendment must return to the floor of Parliament, in a form that the political class cannot defeat without declaring itself openly against Indian women. India is home to one-sixth of womanity. Had the Bill passed, India would have become a lighthouse for the Global South, living proof that gender parity in the world’s largest democracy is mission possible. That lighthouse is still within sight and reach. The Opposition, for one more parliamentary cycle, has chosen to keep the coast dark.
The resolve that carried this cause from manifesto to law will not yield to one day’s arithmetic. I believe that what has been thwarted will be retrieved. What has been deferred will be delivered. India’s daughters will take their rightful place at the apex of our democracy, and the lighthouse will yet be lit. As PM Modi said in his address to the women of India, “Hamara irada adig hai”—our resolve is unshaken and we will keep our pledge to the women of India.
- Lakshmi Puri is a former Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations.
