The Pulse | Politics | South Asia

Modi Government Suffers Setback as Constitutional Amendment Defeated in Parliament

It clubbed an already passed amendment on women’s reservation with the controversial amendment to delimit electoral boundaries. The ploy flopped.

India’s parliament building in New Delhi, India.

For the first time in nearly 12 years since Narendra Modi came to power, a government-sponsored constitutional amendment was defeated in the Indian parliament.

“Modi’s downfall has begun,” said Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of the eastern state of West Bengal and one of India’s key opposition leaders.

The next day, major newspaper headlines were of two kinds. Most said the government’s bill for women’s reservation was defeated. Only a few highlighted that it was a constituency delimitation-linked bill that failed to get passed.

The Modi government had clubbed together two bills with different levels of support from opposition parties. While all major opposition parties support reserving seats for women in legislatures, delimitation or rearranging constituency boundaries has been a contentious issue. Almost all of them oppose delimitation the way Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) allegedly plans to go about it.

The Modi government alleged that the opposition parties foiled their plan to legislatively empower women. Modi warned the opposition of consequences, highlighting that women’s reservation is not confined to the political class alone, but has seeped into popular consciousness.  Women who have benefited from reservations in rural local self-governments feel empowered. “Those who oppose it (reservation) will have to pay consequences for a long time to come,” he said.

The opposition celebrated their victory against what they described as the Modi government’s delimitation “conspiracy.” The Congress, India’s main opposition party, demanded that the government will have to implement women’s reservation under the existing strength of the House, without linking it with census or delimitation.

The government’s declared goal was to expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to around 850 seats, enable delimitation without completion of the just-launched census, and facilitate the implementation of 33 percent women’s reservation in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, and state assemblies from 2029 onwards.

The conflict was mainly over linking delimitation with the latest census. Since 1976, India has had a freeze on the latest population-based delimitation. To encourage proper implementation of population control measures taken in the mid-1970s, the government decided that parliamentary constituencies could be redrawn within every state, but each state’s share of parliamentary seats would remain the same.

Now, thanks to unequal population growth in different regions over the past five decades, this has created a situation where every Lok Sabha member of parliament (MP) in Madhya Pradesh, one of India’s high population growth states, caters to a population of 2.5 million on an average, whereas an average MP in Tamil Nadu, one of India’s low population growth states, works for a population of 1.85 million.

A latest population-based census will benefit northern, central and western states — predominantly the Hindi-speaking heartland — where population grew faster than southern and eastern states.

The Hindi heartland states have been the BJP’s traditional stronghold, while their expansion to the east and south is more recent.

The Modi government argued that population-based delimitation restores “one person, one vote, one value” after 50 years of freeze. However, the opposition sees it as unfair to the southern and eastern states that fared better in implementing the government’s population control policies.

They fear that since their population has grown at a lower pace than the Hindi heartland states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, their........

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