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Opposition parties were successful in defeating the “Mens’s Reservation Bill” clad as Women’s reservation Bill  and the fraudulent “Delimitation Bill”. But once again women’s reservation has been postponed because of the political chicanery of the Modi government’s ulterior motives .

Both in 2023 and 2026, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government used the women reservation bill for their partisan political campaign and not for its genuine implementation.

In 2023, Parliament unanimously passed a law promising 33% seats for women in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies. On paper, it looked historic. In practice, it came with a catch: implementation was tied to a future census and delimitation exercise after 2026. That effectively pushed real change well into the next decade.

At the time, opposition parties objected, arguing that if the intent was genuine, reservation could be implemented as early as the 2024 elections. The government refused.

Fast forward to 2026, and the script has flipped. The same government proposed implementing reservation for the 2029 elections, but tying it to delimitation using the 2011 census through the  131st Constitutional Amendment. It proposed increasing the total number of parliamentary seats to 816 without solid constitutional justification, reserving 33% (273 seats) for women. When southern states strongly opposed this, the government tried to placate them with claims that all states’ seats would be increased equally by 50% by verbal assurance not backed by any........

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