It’s a Trojan horse. That’s one thing we can be sure of about the proposed special session of Parliament, hastily scheduled for April 16-18, to “discuss and pass an important Bill that advances women’s reservation”. The context and the timing tell us that it is about anything but nari shakti. Advancing women’s reservation is a ploy to advance the delimitation of constituencies and thus advance the political prospects of the ruling dispensation. Notwithstanding the “top-dressing”, to borrow Babasaheb’s evocative phrase, it is about tilting the institutional architecture of electoral democracy to favour the ruling party.

Oddly, we do not yet know what this “important Bill” is. We are told the Bill has been cleared by the cabinet. Yet its text has not been shared with the public, not even with parliamentarians. We are told that the government is going to propose a constitutional amendment to modify the Constitution (128th Amendment) Bill of 2023, regarding reservation for women in Lok Sabha and state assemblies. On the face of it, this modification would enable women’s reservation to be operational from the next Lok Sabha election in 2029. But here is the catch: This will be linked to allowing fresh delimitation based on the Census of 2011. And expanding the size of the Lok Sabha by one-and-a-half times, with a proportionate increase in the share of seats for each state.

It is not hard to see through the official rhetoric. The PM’s op-ed (‘We owe it to nari shakti to come together to advance women’s representation’, IE, April 9) assures us that the Bill is going to be “a reflection of the aspirations of crores of women across India” but does not tell us why an expression of their aspirations must be hidden from crores of........

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