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The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, introduced in April 2026, proposed a substantial expansion of the strength of the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats and sought to operationalize 33% reservation for women through an expedited delimitation exercise based on the 2011 Census.

However, the Bill failed to secure passage in the Lok Sabha, falling short of the constitutionally mandated special majority, with 298 votes in favour against the required 352. Critics have argued that despite being framed as a measure to advance women’s political representation and agency, the Bill functioned as a strategic instrument to facilitate delimitation and thereby reconfigure electoral demographics.

In this reading, the discourse of women’s empowerment served as a legitimising framework for a broader structural intervention in the representational architecture of the Indian polity. This critique gains further traction when situated within the legislative trajectory of women’s reservation in India. The Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023, had already provided for 33% reservation for women in Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies. However, its implementation remains contingent upon the completion of a fresh census, which is yet to occur, since the last census was conducted in 2011.

Women’s political reservation is not unprecedented in the Indian context. Provisions for reservation at the level of local self-government institutions were institutionalised through the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts in 1992 and 1993, respectively, which mandated quotas for women in Panchayati Raj Institutions and Urban Local Bodies. Two decades after the enactment of these constitutional provisions, the extent to which they have translated into substantive empowerment for women remains a matter of critical inquiry.

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