Reservation ruse: The Hindu Editorial on women’s quota and delimitation

In a Parliament sitting convened from April 16, the Union government is seeking to advance women’s empowerment, but as part of a wider legislative package: the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, and a companion Delimitation Bill. The stated rationale is the operationalisation of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (the 106th Amendment of 2023), which reserves one-third of Lok Sabha and Assembly seats for women but was tied to a post-Census delimitation. The government’s insistence on bundling women’s reservation with delimitation suggests that the former is being used as political cover for the latter: a sweeping reallocation of Lok Sabha seats that would reshape the federal composition of Parliament to the advantage of States where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys electoral dominance, and at the expense of States where it has been historically weak.

When India’s decennial Census was delayed for more than five years without a definitive or rational explanation from the BJP-led Union government, the political logic was not hard to discern. The 2021 Census was first postponed citing COVID-19, but no reason was offered for the successive deferrals that followed, until it was quietly announced that the exercise would be carried out in 2026-27. Under the Constitution, the freeze on inter-State distribution of Lok Sabha seats, pegged to the 1971 Census, was set to expire only after the first Census conducted after the year 2026 was published. This meant that in the normal course, delimitation would have been based on the 2031 Census. By delaying the Census to 2026-27, the government ensured that the delimitation exercise could be initiated on its preferred timeline, using the 2026-27 Census rather than one conducted in 2031.