Women’s Reservation Bill may finally have won numbers game but hurdles remain

Some 35 years after its idea first took root under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s government, 27 years after the HD Deve Gowda-led government first moved it as a Bill in the Lok Sabha, and over 13 years after it passed the Rajya Sabha litmus test under Dr Manmohan Singh’s UPA regime, the long-pending Women’s Reservation Bill is now, perhaps, just a step away from being enacted.

A meeting of the Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is learnt to have given its nod late Monday (September 18) evening to move the Women’s Reservation Bill for consideration and passing in the Lok Sabha during the ongoing special session of Parliament. Details of the legislation approved by the Cabinet are still shrouded in secrecy since the government decided against holding the customary Cabinet briefing though sources in the government indicated that information regarding the introduction of the Bill may be shared with members of the Lok Sabha’s business advisory committee on Tuesday.

However, Prahlad Patel, the Union Minister of State for Food Processing Industries and Jal Shakti, let it slip on X that the Bill had been approved by the Cabinet and congratulated Modi for having “the moral courage to fulfil the demand for women’s reservation”. That the post was, in all likelihood, an overzealous outburst that did not have the Prime Minister’s approval was evident since no other member of the Cabinet decided to go public about the decision that the Centre had been guarding like a state secret despite spiralling speculations of its imminence. By the time Patel deleted his post, it had already been splashed by all prominent media outlets.

No mention in bulletin

That the Centre could seek the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill had been intensely rumoured ever since Parliament was summoned for a special session without the government sharing the agenda for the five sittings between September 18 and September 22.

Slammed by the Opposition for breaking convention by refusing to divulge the agenda for the special session, though the government did declare a “tentative agenda” last week, the Women’s Reservation Bill found no mention in the business bulletin. This was, of course, consistent with the Prime Minister’s penchant for giving short shrift to the long-established parliamentary convention practised by successive governments of discussing beforehand key legislative reforms, controversial or not, with political stakeholders, including the Opposition.

As was evident in the case of demonetisation, the abrogation of Article 370, even the first COVID lockdown, or more recently, in the case of the Bills proposing wide-ranging reforms in the Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Indian Evidence Act, Modi has often chosen stealth and secrecy over transparency and dialogue to outwit political rivals. Though the practice isn’t morally kosher in a parliamentary democracy, each time the PM has employed it, his party colleagues and a section of the media have hailed it as a masterstroke.

The case of the Women’s Reservation Bill was no different, even if the legislation was widely anticipated given that the PM had, of late, started making efforts with renewed aggression to woo the women electorate ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The Centre’s recent decision to reduce the skyrocketing prices of domestic use LPG cylinders by Rs 200 and the huge focus that women empowerment got in the PM’s Independence Day address were viewed by many as indicators of the Bill being on the anvil.

Original votary of the Bill

For once, the Opposition also seemed prepared. Within days of Parliamentary Affairs minister Pralhad Joshi announcing the decision to summon Parliament’s special session, the Congress party and its allies in the INDIA coalition started demanding that the Bill be enacted during the five-day session. The Congress also included the demand in the resolution adopted at the meeting of its working committee in Hyderabad on September 16, while the party and several of INDIA coalition members vociferously sought the Bill’s passage when Union minister Rajnath Singh convened the customary all-party meeting preceding the special session on Sunday.

The Congress has been the original votary of the Bill. The idea of reserving seats for women in local bodies, assemblies, and Parliament was first proposed back in 1988-1989 by Margaret Alva, then Union minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government, when she presented the National Perspective Plan for Women. It was this plan that eventually led the Congress’s PV Narasimha Rao government to reserve a third of seats for women across all Panchayati Raj institutions and elected municipal bodies.

Though successive central governments helmed by HD Deve Gowda, during whose term the Bill to reserve 33 per cent seats for women in State Assemblies and Parliament was first introduced in the Lok Sabha in 1996, IK Gujral and Atal Behari Vajpayee tried in vain to have the Bill enacted, it was again during the tenure of the Congress-led UPA government of Dr Manmohan Singh that the legislation was passed, on March 9, 2010, in the Rajya Sabha amid dramatic scenes. Unfortunately for the Congress, the Bill could not be enacted, as parties such as Lalu Yadav’s RJD, Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party, and Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) stridently opposed the Bill’s passage in the Lok Sabha on grounds that in its present form, the legislation did not provide for a “quota within the 33 per cent quota” for the representation of OBC women.

Since the Bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha any successive government that wished to take this legislation to its logical conclusion of enactment as law now needed only to muster a majority in the Lok Sabha (and, of course, have it passed by 50 per cent of the state assemblies since this is a constitution amendment). The Modi government, as is well known, has a brute majority in Parliament’s Lower House. Additionally, while the BJP is in power (on its own or in coalition) in nearly a dozen states, over a dozen other states are ruled by its rivals or friendly parties such as Naveen Patnaik’s BJD (Odisha) and Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSRCP (Andhra Pradesh), which have already endorsed the Bill. Thus, the numbers game finally favours the Bill’s passage.

Congress campaign

It is, thus, not surprising that even before the Union Cabinet approved the Bill, Congress communications department chief Jairam Ramesh and his party colleagues began a sustained campaign on social media platforms to remind people of their party’s role in pushing the idea of reservation for women in Parliament and state legislatures.

It is also pertinent to note that Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and his immediate predecessors, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, have all declared the full support of their party for the Bill. Ever since Modi became PM, both Sonia and Rahul have, in fact, repeatedly written to him demanding that the Bill be passed. Unsurprisingly, Congress leaders like Ramesh and P Chidambaram have been quick to point out that the Modi government, which has enjoyed an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha since 2014, wasted nine years and was forced to revive the Bill now, months before the General Elections, under pressure from the Congress and for its own electoral considerations.

It remains to be seen though whether the Modi government has introduced any amendments to the UPA-era Bill that was passed by the Rajya Sabha. That Bill proposed 33 per cent reservation for women in Parliament and state legislatures for a period of 15 years (three general election cycles), with a provision to extend the affirmative action further. Additionally, the Bill proposed that one-third of the presently reserved seats for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes be reserved for women of the two communities.

However, unlike the SC and ST reserved seats in assemblies and Parliament which are not subject to rotation, women’s reservation was to be applied on a rotational basis, meaning that it wasn’t necessary that a constituency reserved for a woman candidate in the first cycle of elections will fall under the same reserved category in the next cycle too — as is also the case with women-reserved seats in urban local bodies and panchayat institutions.

Quota within quota?

The actual scope and remit of the Bill cleared by the Union Cabinet will only be known when the government decides to go public with it. However, at a time when the Opposition is coalescing against the BJP under the INDIA banner for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, Modi may be hoping that the Bill will foment divisions among his political rivals.

As reported by The Federal earlier, the RJD and SP — both part of the INDIA bloc — had expressed strong reservations against the Bill when a number of Opposition parties urged Rajnath Singh at Sunday’s all-party meeting to have the legislation listed for consideration and passing by the Lok Sabha during the special session.

Both RJD and SP remain steadfast in their demand for a quota within quota for OBC candidates — something that can’t practically be rolled out in the absence of a Caste Census and a new delimitation exercise, which is due only in 2026. There have been some vague indications from sources in the Modi government that though it will have the Bill passed during the ongoing Parliament session, it will be implemented only after the 2026 delimitation exercise is concluded.

Therein also lies another catch for the Opposition. Will the Modi regime also bring in a Bill promising an OBC quota in state legislatures and Parliament to deflate the INDIA bloc’s electorally polarising narrative in favour of a Caste Census that the BJP has been finding difficult to counter? During his customary byte to reporters ahead of the special session, Modi alluded to not one but several “historic decisions” that his government plans to unveil over the next four days. The Women’s Reservation Bill may yet not be the only surprise that the Prime Minister plans to spring on his rivals months before the watershed electoral battle for Raisina Hill.