Govind Tekale
Six months after the Lok Sabha rejected an attempt to expand the lower house and implement India’s 33% women’s seat quota, Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju has written to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge in response to an October 16 letter Kharge sent to Prime Minister Modi — reopening the question of how and when the women’s reservation can actually take effect.
The correspondence and the political moment
Kharge wrote to Modi on October 16 seeking a meeting to discuss delimitation and the women’s quota. Rijiju’s reply cited outreach to regional parties — including the DMK, Samajwadi Party, YSRCP, NCP, Shiv Sena (UBT), AIMIM, and BJD — as evidence of momentum toward cross-party discussion. Kharge was also reported to be seeking a meeting with the Prime Minister on October 21.
Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh responded on October 20 by asking the Centre to clarify whether it was tabling a “firm new proposal” on delimitation, or continuing conversations that have not yet produced a revised plan.
Why the April 17 vote in the Lok Sabha failed
The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, which sought to facilitate a new delimitation exercise and proposed raising the Lok Sabha’s seat ceiling toward 850, was defeated in the Lok Sabha on April 17, receiving 298 votes in favor to 230 against — significantly short of the two-thirds majority of approximately 352 votes required for a constitutional amendment.
Following the defeat, Rijiju withdrew two related bills: the Delimitation Bill and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill. The 2023 Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam remains in force, but its implementation is tied to a future census and delimitation exercise.
Why the standoff persists
The government’s position, as it has argued publicly, is that a new delimitation is needed to roll out the 33% quota without reducing any existing state’s current seat allocation. Southern parties — led by Tamil Nadu’s DMK — and the Congress party have argued that this framework penalizes states that reduced their population growth through decades of public health investment, and that the women’s quota should be implemented immediately within the existing 543-seat House, with reserved constituencies rotated across states.
Any immediate implementation of the quota within the current House would require amending the 2023 Act, which the government has not proposed. That legal and political gap — between what the 2023 law requires and what the opposition will accept — is where the current standoff sits.
As of October 20, no revised proposal had been tabled. The delimitation debate remains unresolved. Congress’s position on the next steps is contingent on seeing whether a genuinely new formula emerges from the ongoing consultations.
