An Independent Analysis · India · 2026
The Promise and the Postponement
An unpartisan examination of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam — its meaning, its limits, and the unfinished history of women’s political equality in India
On September 19, 2023, something happened in the new
Parliament building of India that had not happened in 27 years of trying. A
bill that had been introduced six times, disrupted in its introduction, torn up
on the floor of the house, passed in one chamber and left to die in the other —
finally passed. Both houses. Unanimously. With 454 votes in favour in the Lok
Sabha, and 214 in the Rajya Sabha without a single dissent.
The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam — the Constitution's
106th Amendment — reserves one-third of all seats in the Lok Sabha, every state
legislative assembly, and the Delhi assembly for women. On paper, it is the
most significant legislative intervention in Indian women's political life
since the Constitution itself was written in 1950.
And yet — it will not come into force until after the
next Census, which has not been conducted. And after that Census, a
delimitation exercise must be completed. Best estimates place the first
election under this law at 2029 at the earliest.
This blog is not a celebration. It is not a criticism.
It is an attempt at something harder and rarer — an honest reckoning. A look at
what this law actually is, where it comes from, what it achieves, what it fails
to achieve, and what it tells us about India's ongoing, unfinished, profoundly
complicated relationship with the political equality of its women.
No party. No ideology. Only the truth, as clearly as it can be seen.
Section I
Before the Law: A Country That Never Kept
Its Promise
To understand what the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam
means, you must first understand what came before it. Not as political history,
but as lived reality — the slow, grinding accumulation of broken promises that
made this law both necessary and long overdue.
When India became independent in 1947, its
Constitution was a radical document. It granted women universal adult suffrage
without a single qualification — no property test, no literacy requirement.
Indian women could vote from day one of the republic. Britain gave its women
full voting rights only in 1928. France did so in 1944. Switzerland waited
until 1971. In formal terms, India's founders did something extraordinary.
But the Constituent Assembly debates revealed a
tension that has never been resolved. When the question of reserving seats for
women in Parliament was raised, it was rejected — not out of malice, but out of
a specific theory of equality: that in a democracy, you do not pre-assign seats
on the basis of identity. You give everyone the right to vote, the right to
stand, and then you let the democratic process work.
The theory was noble. The reality was a disaster.
The Numbers That Told the Truth
- 1st
Lok Sabha (1952): Women won 22 seats out of 489 — 4.4%
- 4th
Lok Sabha (1967): Women won 29 seats — a slight rise, then stagnation
- 5th
Lok Sabha (1971): Women won 22 seats — the same as 1952, two decades later
- State
assemblies averaged below 5% women throughout the 1960s and 70s
- By
1974, the government's own committee found women's political impact
"marginal"
- 17th
Lok Sabha (2019): Women held 14.4% of seats — after 70 years of
independence
- Global
average for women in Parliament in 2023: 26.5%. India: 15%
The data told a story that no amount of constitutional
idealism could paper over. Formal equality — equal right to vote, equal right
to stand — had produced profound, structural inequality in outcomes. Women were
voting in increasing numbers. Women were working, studying, running households,
building communities. But the rooms where laws were made, budgets were
allocated, and power was distributed remained overwhelmingly male.
This was not accidental. It was the product of
specific, identifiable forces: political parties that systematically denied
tickets to women candidates; social norms that treated a woman's political
ambition as unseemly; financial barriers that made the cost of election
campaigns prohibitive for women with no family wealth or party machinery behind
them; and criminal networks entrenched in electoral politics that made the
physical experience of campaigning dangerous for women.
One is not born a woman in politics. One
becomes invisible.
Paraphrasing de Beauvoir — applied to the Indian
Parliament, 1952–2023
The constitution gave women the right to enter. But the building had no ramp.
Section II
The Foundation: Towards Equality and
Fifty Years of Unheeded Wisdom
In 1971, the Indian government did something unusual:
it appointed a committee to honestly assess the condition of women in India,
twenty-five years after independence. The committee's members included some of
the finest minds of post-independence India — lawyers, economists,
sociologists, activists. Its Member Secretary was Vina Mazumdar, a
scholar who would go on to found the Centre for Women's Development Studies and
become one of the defining intellectual voices of Indian feminism.
The report they produced, submitted on December 31,
1974, was titled Towards Equality. It is one of the most
important documents in Indian public life. Most people have never read it. Most
politicians who debate women's reservation today have likely never opened it.
Its central finding was simple and devastating: formal
equality had failed. The Constitution's equal rights had not produced
equal outcomes. In almost every measurable dimension — literacy, employment,
wages, health, political representation — women's position relative to men had
either stagnated or deteriorated in the first quarter-century of independence.
The transition from agrarian to industrial economy was not liberating women; it
was removing them from productive economic roles without replacing those roles
with anything. The "development" happening in India was development
for men, built on women's invisible, uncompensated labour.
On politics specifically, the committee found
something that should have been a national scandal: women's parliamentary
representation had not grown with time — it had barely moved, and in some
election cycles, gone backward. The committee's explanation was structural, not
individual. Women were not failing to win elections because they were less
capable than men. They were failing because political parties were not
giving them tickets. The gatekeepers of Indian democracy — the parties
— were systematically excluding women from candidacy.
The committee therefore made two recommendations that
are worth reading carefully:
First: Each
political party should self-impose a quota for women candidates. The parties
themselves — not just the government — must reform. Without this,
constitutional reservation of seats would be a floor, not a ceiling. Women
would be confined to reserved seats; in unreserved seats, parties would
continue to prefer men.
Second: As a
transitional measure, constitutional amendments should reserve seats for women
in municipal councils and panchayats — the lowest level of government — to
build a pipeline of experienced women politicians who could move upward.
It is 2024. The second recommendation was implemented
— eighteen years later, by the 73rd and 74th Amendments in 1992. The first
recommendation — parties reforming themselves internally — has never
been implemented. Not by any party. Not in fifty years.
This is the first truth that any honest discussion of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam must confront: the problem was identified, analysed, and correctly diagnosed in 1974. What followed was not ignorance — it was political will.
Section III
The Panchayat Experiment: What We Already
Know Works
Before we assess the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, we
must look at what happened when India ran the experiment at the local level —
because the results are extraordinary, and they answer most of the objections
raised against reservation.
The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments (1992)
mandated one-third reservation for women in Panchayati Raj institutions —
village and town councils — across India. It was the first time a
constitutional requirement for women's political reservation had been put into
law. The opposition at the time was fierce: women would be "proxies"
for their husbands; they lacked experience; they would be controlled by male
relatives; reservation would undermine merit; it was undemocratic.
Thirty years later, we have data. And the data is
unambiguous.
Today, India has over 1.4 million elected
women representatives in Panchayati Raj institutions — the largest
cohort of elected women representatives anywhere in the world. In at least 18
states, women's representation in local bodies exceeds 50%. In Bihar,
Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Odisha, and Kerala, the legal quota was
expanded to 50% by state governments.
And the outcomes? Research across multiple states
shows that where women held decision-making power in village councils, spending
on public goods associated with women's priorities — drinking water,
sanitation, primary health, girls' education — increased measurably. This is
not theoretical. This is data from the ground.
Were there proxy representatives? Yes — in the early
years, especially in socially conservative districts, some women
representatives had male relatives speaking for them. This was real. But
research also shows this declined significantly over successive terms of
reservation. By the second and third cycles of reserved seats, women
representatives were demonstrably more independent, more knowledgeable about
their rights, and more assertive in decision-making. Reservation built the
pipeline that Vina Mazumdar's committee had called for in 1974.
The panchayat experiment proved something that opponents of reservation refuse to concede: representation creates capacity. You do not wait for capacity before giving representation. The waiting itself is what prevents the capacity from forming.
Section IV
Twenty-Seven Years of Failure: The Bill
That Would Not Die
The story of the Women's Reservation Bill between 1996
and 2023 is one of the most humiliating episodes in Indian parliamentary
history. Not because the bill failed — bills fail. But because of how it
failed, and why.
1987
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's government introduces a
Constitutional Amendment Bill for women's reservation in local bodies. It
passes the Lok Sabha, fails in the Rajya Sabha. The seed is planted.
1988
The National Perspective Plan for Women formally
recommends reservation from Panchayat to Parliament. The policy architecture is
now complete — it just needs political will to implement.
1992
73rd and 74th Amendments passed — local body
reservation achieved. The lower rung of the ladder is built. The upper rungs —
state assemblies and Parliament — remain absent.
1996
The HD Deve Gowda government introduces the 81st
Constitutional Amendment Bill for 33% reservation in Parliament and state
assemblies. OBC parties — SP, RJD — oppose it fiercely, demanding a sub-quota
for OBC women. The bill is sent to a Joint Parliamentary Committee headed by
Geeta Mukherjee. It lapses when the Lok Sabha dissolves.
1998–2003
The Vajpayee government attempts to introduce the bill
in four consecutive sessions. Each attempt is disrupted — physically, with MPs
tearing up bill copies, rushing the Speaker's podium, shutting down
proceedings. RJD and SP lead the disruption. The bill never reaches a vote.
2008–2010
UPA government reintroduces the bill. After
extraordinary drama — the Rajya Sabha is specially convened, members of
disruptive parties are suspended, and the bill is passed with 186 votes and one
against. The Rajya Sabha has spoken. The Lok Sabha never votes on it. It
expires when the Lok Sabha dissolves in 2014, then again in 2019.
2023
The Modi government introduces the bill in the first
session of the new Parliament building. Both houses pass it within two days.
The 106th Amendment is signed into law. The 27-year wait ends — but the
implementation is deferred to post-Census, post-delimitation. The wait
continues in a different form.
What does this timeline tell us? It tells us that the
obstacle to women's political reservation in India was never philosophical — it
was political. The parties that disrupted the bill were not against women. They
were against women getting seats at the expense of their own vote-bank
calculations. The OBC parties feared, with some justification, that without a
sub-quota for OBC women, the reserved seats would go to upper-caste women from
politically connected families — replicating existing hierarchies in a new
form.
That concern was legitimate. It remains legitimate. And the 2023 law does not resolve it.
Section V
What the Law Actually Says: Reading the
Fine Print
The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam inserts three new
articles into the Constitution — Articles 330A, 332A, and 334A — and amends
Article 239AA to bring the Delhi assembly within its scope. Here is what those
articles actually do, in plain language:
Article 330A — Reservation in Lok Sabha
One-third of the total number of seats in the Lok
Sabha are reserved for women. Of this one-third, one-third of the seats already
reserved for SC/ST candidates are further reserved specifically for SC and ST
women. The reserved seats rotate after each delimitation — meaning the same
constituency will not be permanently a "women's seat."
Article 332A — Reservation in State
Assemblies
The same formula applies to state legislative
assemblies. One-third of all seats, with internal reservation for SC/ST women
within the SC/ST quota.
Article 334A — The Sunset and the Trigger
This is the most important and most contested article.
The reservation is not permanent — it lasts fifteen years from the date of
commencement, with Parliament having the power to extend it. And commencement
itself is conditional: the reservation will come into effect only
after delimitation is completed following the first Census conducted after the
Act's enactment.
The Census was due in 2021. It was postponed due to
COVID. As of 2024, it has not been conducted. Delimitation cannot happen
without Census data. The reservation therefore cannot begin until both are
complete. The best-case scenario, according to the government's own statements,
is that the reservation applies from the 2029 general elections.
There is no constitutional guarantee that it will be
2029. If the Census is further delayed, or if delimitation takes longer than
expected, the reservation could apply even later. The law provides no deadline.
It provides no mechanism for enforcement if the government delays the Census.
It is, in this sense, a law that has been passed but not yet born.
What the Law Does and Does Not Do
- DOES:
Reserve 33% of Lok Sabha and state assembly seats for women
- DOES:
Create sub-reservation for SC and ST women within the women's quota
- DOES:
Apply to the Delhi assembly via amendment to Article 239AA
- DOES
NOT: Create a sub-quota for OBC women
- DOES
NOT: Require political parties to field women in unreserved seats
- DOES
NOT: Set a deadline for the Census or delimitation
- DOES
NOT: Apply to the Rajya Sabha or state legislative councils
- DOES
NOT: Address financial barriers to women's candidacy
- DOES NOT: Address the criminalization of politics that makes campaigns dangerous for women
Section VI
The Woman Question in India: Why One
Category Was Never Enough
The most intellectually serious objection to the Nari
Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam — the one that cannot be dismissed as political
opportunism — is this: women in India are not one thing.
India is a society structured by the simultaneous
operation of gender, caste, class, religion, and geography. To say "women
should have reservation" is to describe a category so internally diverse
that a single policy cannot address its full reality. The experience of a
Brahmin woman from south Delhi and the experience of a Dalit woman from a
village in Vidarbha are both experiences of gender oppression — but they are
not the same experience, and they do not require the same remedy.
Ambedkar understood this before anyone coined the word
"intersectionality." He argued in the Constituent Assembly debates,
and in his writings on caste and gender, that caste and gender are not
two separate systems of oppression — they are the same system, operating
through the same mechanisms. Caste hierarchy is maintained primarily
through the control of women's sexuality, labour, and mobility. Upper-caste
purity is a function of upper-caste women's seclusion. Lower-caste degradation
is enforced through the sexual violation of lower-caste women. You cannot
dismantle one without the other.
This is not a theoretical claim. This is the history
of India.
Dalit Women: Triple Marginalization
Dalit women face what scholars call triple
marginalization: the oppression of gender, the oppression of caste
untouchability, and the oppression of poverty — each amplifying the others.
Dalit women are disproportionately represented among manual scavengers — people
who clean human waste by hand, a practice that continues illegally across
India. They are disproportionately targeted for caste-based sexual violence,
which is used as a tool of upper-caste dominance. The Hathras case (2020), the
Unnao case (2019), and hundreds of unreported cases every year are not
aberrations — they are the systematic use of sexual violence to maintain caste
hierarchy.
The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam does create a
sub-quota for SC women within the women's reservation — this is important. SC
women will not have to compete against upper-caste women for all seats. But the
sub-quota is set at one-third of the seats already reserved for SC candidates —
meaning Dalit women get a share of what Dalit candidates already have, not an
additive reservation.
OBC Women: The Largest and Most Ignored
Group
OBC communities constitute roughly 50% of India's
population — the single largest social bloc. OBC women therefore represent
approximately 25% of the country's total population. They face gender
oppression compounded by social and educational backwardness — but they are
neither as legally protected as SC/ST women, nor as resourced as upper-caste
women.
The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam has no
sub-quota for OBC women. This is the law's most significant failure.
Without an OBC sub-quota, critics correctly point out that the 33% women's
reservation will disproportionately benefit women who already have social
capital — women from upper-caste families with political networks, financial
resources, and party connections. The pattern from state assembly elections
where women have been fielded supports this concern: women candidates are most
often fielded in seats that are considered unwinnable or as "family
representatives" of male politicians, not as independent OBC women with
their own political bases.
Muslim Women: Invisible in the Debate
Muslim women constitute approximately 7% of India's
population — and their political representation is among the lowest of any
group. They face gender discrimination within the community compounded by the
political marginalization of Muslims as a whole. The Nari Shakti Vandan
Adhiniyam has no provision specifically addressing Muslim women's
representation. AIMIM MPs voted against the bill on exactly this ground — not
against women's reservation, but against a reservation that would not
structurally address the exclusion of Muslim women.
This is a legitimate concern. It is also one with no
easy answer — the Constitution does not permit reservation on religious
grounds. But ignoring the concern does not make it disappear.
Tribal Women: Geography as Exclusion
Adivasi women face a form of marginalization that is
geographic as much as social. Tribal communities are concentrated in areas with
the weakest state presence — poorest infrastructure, most distant from courts,
hospitals, schools, and political centres. Tribal women often have more gender
equality within their own communities than upper-caste women do in theirs — but
face devastating exploitation when they engage with the mainstream economy and
state. Displacement from forest lands, trafficking, and caste-based violence
are structural realities. The law does provide for ST women within the ST
sub-quota — but this addresses representation without addressing the structural
conditions that make Tribal women's political participation so difficult.
A law that treats women as one community,
when women in India live in dozens of different communities that treat them
differently — is a law that sees only half the picture.
The OBC Sub-Quota Argument — the strongest unresolved critique
Section VII
Equality Before Law: The Constitutional
Debate
Every major reservation policy in India faces the same
constitutional question: does reservation violate the right to equality
guaranteed by Articles 14 and 15? And if so, can it nonetheless be justified?
The Indian Constitution's answer — developed over
seventy years of Supreme Court jurisprudence — is sophisticated and important.
Article 14 guarantees equality before the law. Article 15 prohibits
discrimination on grounds of sex (among others). But Article 15(3) specifically
empowers the state to make special provisions for women and children. And
Article 15(4) allows special provisions for socially and educationally backward
classes. Article 16(4) allows reservation in public employment.
The Supreme Court's framework — established in
landmark cases including Indra Sawhney (1992), M. Nagaraj (2006), and Jarnail
Singh (2018) — holds that reservation is not a violation of equality; it is
a tool for achieving equality. Formal equality (treating
everyone identically) and substantive equality (achieving equal outcomes in
conditions of structural inequality) are different things. The Constitution
mandates both, and where they conflict, substantive equality takes precedence.
Applied to women's political reservation: the argument
is that treating men and women identically in electoral politics — giving both
equal right to stand — produces unequal outcomes because the conditions are
structurally unequal. Women face financial barriers, social barriers, party
gatekeeping, physical safety concerns, and cultural norms about women in public
life that men do not face in the same way. Reserving seats corrects for these
structural disadvantages — it does not create inequality, it compensates for
pre-existing inequality.
Critics raise two specific objections here that
deserve serious engagement:
Objection 1: Reservation restricts voter
choice. If a constituency is reserved for women, male
voters in that constituency cannot vote for a male candidate. This is a genuine
democratic cost. The counter-argument is that the restriction is temporary,
rotates across constituencies, and is justified by the larger democratic gain
of including a previously excluded group in governance. The same logic applies
to SC/ST reservation — it restricts choice in reserved seats, but the Supreme
Court has repeatedly upheld it as constitutional.
Objection 2: Women are not a homogeneous group like a caste. Unlike SCs or STs who can be identified and counted as a discrete group, "women" cross all caste, class, and religious lines. A reservation that treats all women as equally deserving of affirmative action ignores massive internal inequalities. This is the strongest objection — and it is precisely why the demand for OBC, SC, and ST sub-quotas within the women's reservation is not divisive politics but principled equality jurisprudence.
Section VIII
The Delimitation Question: Why the
State-Level Politics Is Really About Power
The most complex dimension of the Nari Shakti Vandan
Adhiniyam is not about women at all — it is about which states get how
many seats in Parliament. The law's link to delimitation has turned a
women's rights issue into a North-South political confrontation.
Here is the structural problem. India's last
delimitation — redrawing of constituency boundaries and reallocation of Lok
Sabha seats to states — was done in 2008, based on the 1971 Census. Since then,
India's population has grown, and grown very unequally across states. Northern
states — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan — have grown much
faster than southern states — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh,
Telangana.
Southern states grew slowly because they followed
family planning policies aggressively for decades. If delimitation now happens
based on population, they will lose seats relative to the north — effectively
being punished for successful development. A Tamil Nadu
voter's political voice would become worth less than a UP voter's, simply
because Tamil Nadu had fewer children.
The government's proposed solution — increasing total
Lok Sabha seats from 543 to 815, with all states gaining seats in proportion to
their existing share — attempts to address this. But opposition parties,
particularly from south and northeast India, do not trust the process. They
fear that the Delimitation Commission, once constituted, will prioritize
population data in ways that shift power northward regardless of assurances.
The women's reservation bill therefore arrived
entangled in a separate, pre-existing political battle about federal power
distribution. And this entanglement is one reason the Opposition — which
largely supports women's reservation — has nonetheless opposed the delimitation
bills introduced to implement it. They support the reservation. They oppose the
process through which it is being activated.
This is not a trivial distinction. The mechanism matters as much as the outcome. A women's reservation achieved through a delimitation process that centralizes power and weakens smaller states would be a pyrrhic victory — progress on gender at the cost of regression on federalism.
Section IX
What Women Actually Need in Politics:
Beyond Seats
A seat in Parliament is necessary. It is not
sufficient. If the history of women's political reservation in India teaches
anything, it is that the formal act of reservation — adding more women to a
legislature — does not automatically change the conditions that marginalize
women in the first place. Reservation is a tool. The work is what happens
after.
Here is what the law cannot do, and what therefore
must come from elsewhere:
Internal party reform. Vina
Mazumdar called for this in 1974. The National Perspective Plan called for it
in 1988. It has not happened. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the percentage
of women candidates fielded by major parties was: BJP — 13.4%. Congress —
14.9%. BSP — 18%. SP — 12%. NCP — 12.5%. The national average across all
parties was 8.8%. Even with women's reservation in Parliament, parties will
control which women get tickets in reserved seats, and which women (almost
none) get tickets in unreserved seats. Without internal party reform,
reservation creates a ceiling as much as it raises a floor.
Campaign finance reform. Indian
elections are extraordinarily expensive. The cost of contesting a Lok Sabha
seat, even modestly, runs into crores of rupees. Women who do not have family
wealth, party machinery, or criminal networks behind them find this barrier
insurmountable. Reservation gives them the legal right to stand. It does not
give them the money to campaign. Without state funding of elections or serious
limits on campaign spending, reservation will disproportionately benefit women
from wealthy, politically established families.
Safety. Campaigning
in India involves physical presence at rallies, door-to-door canvassing,
late-night meetings, travel through unsafe areas. For many women — particularly
from lower castes in rural constituencies — this physical exposure carries real
risk. The violence, harassment, and intimidation directed at women politicians
is documented, recurring, and rarely prosecuted. No reservation policy
addresses this. Only a transformation of political culture and a functioning
criminal justice system can.
Legislative culture. Getting women into Parliament is step one. What happens inside Parliament matters. Multiple studies of women legislators globally show that women legislators prioritize health, education, water, sanitation, and social protection. But this policy influence depends on women being integrated into legislative processes — committee assignments, leadership positions, floor speaking time. In India's current parliamentary culture, dominated by disruption, party discipline, and seniority-based allocation of power, there is no guarantee that more women in seats translates to more women in power.
Section X
The Global Mirror: Where India Stands
It is useful to place India's situation in global
context — not to shame India, but to understand what is possible and what
works.
Women in Parliament — Global Comparison (2023–24)
- Rwanda
— 61%. Achieved through post-genocide constitutional reservation and
political restructuring
- Iceland
— 47.6%. No formal reservation; achieved through party-level voluntary
quotas and political culture shift
- Sweden
— 46.4%. Party quotas and zipper lists (alternating male-female on party
lists)
- Mexico
— 50%. Constitutional parity requirement after decades of partial
reservation
- UK
— 35%. Labour Party's all-women shortlists combined with cultural shift
- USA
— 28.9%. No federal reservation; state-by-state variation; slow
incremental growth
- Pakistan
— 20.6%. Reserved seats for women in National Assembly
- Bangladesh
— 21%. Reserved seats plus direct election
- India
— 15% (current). To reach 33%+ requires implementation of the 2023 law
Several lessons emerge from this comparison. First,
reservation works — Rwanda, Mexico, and many other countries have used
constitutional or legal quotas to dramatically increase women's representation,
and the results in governance outcomes have been measurably positive. Second,
reservation alone is not always necessary — countries like Iceland and Sweden
achieved high representation through party-level voluntary quotas combined with
political culture change. The difference is that those party-level reforms
happened because of sustained civil society pressure over decades. India tried
voluntary party reform — recommended it in 1974, called for it in 1988 — and
parties ignored it. Hence the need for constitutional compulsion.
Third, and most importantly: numbers are not the same as power. Pakistan has reserved seats for women and ranks among the lowest in gender equality. What matters is whether women legislators have real power — over committee assignments, budgets, party leadership, and policy. Seats without power are tokenism.
Section XI
The Honest Verdict: Historic, Incomplete,
and Conditional
Unpartisan Assessment
What the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam Is —
and Is Not
The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam is historic. That is
not propaganda — it is fact. India took seventy-three years to constitutionally
guarantee women a minimum share of its national legislature. That guarantee
matters. Even imperfect representation is better than no representation. Even a
deferred beginning is better than no beginning.
The law is also incomplete. The absence of an OBC
sub-quota is not a minor technical omission — it is a fundamental failure to
reckon with how caste and gender intersect in India. The 1974 "Towards
Equality" report understood this. The 1988 National Perspective Plan
understood this. The 1996 Geeta Mukherjee committee understood this. The 2023
law does not implement this understanding. It creates a women's reservation
that will, in the absence of corrective party-level action, disproportionately
benefit women who already have caste, class, and family advantages.
The law is also conditional — on a Census that has not
been conducted, a delimitation that cannot happen without the Census, and a
political process that could theoretically delay implementation for years
beyond 2029. This conditionality is not an oversight — it is a deliberate
structural feature. The question of intent is legitimate: was the delay
mechanism inserted to give time for orderly implementation, or to create
political distance between the promise and the delivery?
And the law's silence on internal party reform — the
most radical and most important of the 1974 recommendations — means that even
when the law comes into effect, parties will control which women enter the
reserved seats. Without diversity in ticket allocation within those seats,
"women's reservation" could become in practice "politically
connected women's reservation."
These criticisms do not cancel the achievement. They exist alongside it. The honest position is to hold both simultaneously: to welcome the historic passage of a long-overdue law, and to insist without apology that its incompleteness is not acceptable, its conditionality is not inevitable, and the unfinished business of fifty years of feminist policy work cannot be declared done by a law that defers its own implementation.
What a Democracy Owes Its Women
There is a woman named Savitribai Phule who walked to
school every morning in 1848, carrying a second saree in her bag. People threw
stones at her on the way. When she arrived at the school she had founded — for
girls, for Dalit girls, for girls whom the Brahmanical order had declared unfit
for education — she changed into the clean saree and began teaching. She did
this every day.
There is a woman named Tarabai Shinde who, in 1882,
wrote a text called Stri Purush Tulana — a comparison of men
and women — that directly confronted the sexual double standards of the society
she lived in. She was from a non-Brahmin community. She had no university
degree. She had no political party behind her. She had only her pen and her
outrage and her clarity of mind. The text she wrote in 1882 is still radical by
2024 standards.
There is a woman named Begum Rokeya who in 1905
published Sultana's Dream — a feminist utopia where men were
kept in purdah and women ran the world. She published it in English, in a
country under colonial rule, from a community in purdah. She then spent the
rest of her life opening schools for Muslim girls in Calcutta.
There is a woman named Vina Mazumdar who in 1974
submitted a report that told the Government of India exactly what was wrong and
exactly what to do. She had the data. She had the analysis. She had the
recommendations. The government received the report, thanked her, and spent the
next fifty years implementing the easier parts while deferring the harder ones.
These women — and the millions of unnamed women who
lived and struggled in conditions of systematic exclusion — are the context in
which the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam must be understood. Not as the
conclusion of their struggle. As the latest development in it. An important
development. An incomplete one. One that arrives with a deferred date of birth.
A democracy does not owe its women gratitude for
finally acknowledging their right to govern. It owes them an accounting — of
how long it took, of what it still hasn't done, and of the work that remains.
The law has passed. The work has not ended.
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This analysis draws on: Committee on the Status of Women in India, Towards Equality (1974) · National Perspective Plan for Women 1988–2000, Dept. of Women & Child Development · PRS Legislative Research, Bill analyses (2008, 2023) · Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023 · Drishti IAS constitutional analysis · Supreme Court judgments: Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992), M. Nagaraj v. Union of India (2006) · Academic work of Vina Mazumdar, Nivedita Menon, Uma Chakravarti, Kalpana Kannabiran · Ministry of Panchayati Raj data on women representatives (2021–24) · IPU Parline Global Data on National Parliaments · UN Women Global Database on Women in Politics
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About the Authors
Khushi Yadav and Aditya Mishra are third-year BALLB students at Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith. Their academic interests include constitutional law, public policy, and the evolving landscape of democratic representation in India.
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