Letters to the Editor — April 16, 2026

Enact reservation now

Thirty years. That is how long Indian women have been waiting for this moment. Thirty years of promises, procedural objections, and political calculations that always found reasons to push women’s representation to the next session, the next government. The Women’s Reservation Bill was first introduced in 1996. Congress held power for a full decade after that. The Rajya Sabha passed the bill in 2010. And then, for four consecutive years, under a government that Sonia Gandhi herself chaired, the Bill was never brought to the Lok Sabha floor. Not once. She now calls PM Modi’s urgency “extraordinary hurry” (Editorial page, April 13 — “Delimitation, and not women’s reservation, is the issue”). Every party, including the Congress, voted for the Adhiniyam in September 2023. Now, as the government moves to make the reservation effective from 2029, the Congress has reversed each one of those positions. The urgency they demanded has become the mischief they condemn. The timeline they insisted upon has become the process they oppose. Sonia ji raises delimitation as her central concern. She is right that it deserves careful handling. No southern State should lose political ground because it responsibly controlled its population while others did not. PM Modi has given an explicit, on-record assurance that no State, including Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, or Telangana, will see a reduction in Lok Sabha seats. The 2011 Census, the last completed and verified count, forms the basis for this exercise. This is not an assault on the Constitution. It is a correction of a delay. Then there is the OBC sub-quota question. It deserves a serious answer and will get one in time. But let us be honest about its history. The parties that raised it loudest between 1998-2010 were not making a social justice argument. They were running a delay operation.