When the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam was passed in 2023, I was asked repeatedly how I felt. It is a question I found difficult to answer. There are some political events that look, from a distance, like resolution—but on closer examination, reveal themselves to be another form of deferral dressed in the language of triumph. The passage of this bill belongs to that category.
The legislation came with its implementation tied to the completion of a delimitation exercise that cannot begin until after a census, whose scheduling remained unannounced. The women of India received, in effect, a constitutional amendment and a bureaucratic hedge with it.
THE COMPROMISED PROMISE
To understand why this bill took so long—and why its passage, even in this form, carries genuine weight—one has to begin not in 1996, when it first entered Parliament, but in 1975, when international conversation made it intellectually inevitable.
The first UN World Conference on Women, in Mexico City, was more significant for what it set in motion than for what it immediately produced. The Declaration of Mexico was careful, its language recommendatory rather than binding. But it established something important: that women’s exclusion from political life was a structural problem, not an incidental one, and that addressing it required deliberate intervention. The momentum built through Nairobi in 1985, where the Forward-Looking Strategies document spoke with greater specificity—a 30 per cent threshold, a year 2000 horizon—and culminated in Beijing in 1995, where the Platform for Action made the most direct argument: formal equality before the law was insufficient where structural exclusion remained intact. Affirmative measures were not a concession to weakness. They were a recognition of how power actually works.
Indian delegates returned from each conference with the energising solidarity of having spoken with counterparts from countries where the numbers had already changed. What they encountered at home was a legislature that had heard the arguments and found them, on balance, less compelling than the alternative.
The numbers, then as now, make the case obvious. In the first Lok Sabha of 1952, women comprised 4.4 per cent of the membership. In 2019, after 70 years of parliamentary democracy and an unbroken tradition of women in the highest offices of the executive, the figure was 14.3 per cent.
WHAT THE PANCHAYATI RAJ EXPERIMENT PROVED
Before the bill reached Parliament in its national form, something important had already happened in the country’s lower tiers of governance. Rajiv Gandhi’s government introduced the 64th and 65th constitutional amendment bills in 1989, seeking to reserve one-third of the seats for women in panchayats and urban local bodies. They were defeated in the Rajya Sabha, but the intention was recorded. And it carried weight.
The P.V. Narasimha Rao government completed this work through the 73rd and 74th amendments in 1992 and 1993, and the credit for that political will belongs to Rao.
But the vision—the conviction that democratic legitimacy required the presence of those who had been systematically excluded from it—was something Rajiv Gandhi articulated clearly and early, at a moment when such articulation was neither electorally obvious nor politically safe.
I served in Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet, and I knew the weight he gave to the question of women in public life. The National Perspective Plan for Women, which we developed in 1988, was a document that placed political participation at the centre of many recommendations for women’s advancement. Our argument was that every other gain for women remained precarious without representation at the high table where decisions are made. Gains in health policy, in property rights, in education—all of these were subject to reversal by legislatures in which women’s voices were structurally marginal.
What happened after the 73rd amendment gave us evidence, rather than just argument. More than 15 lakh women were elected to panchayats and municipalities in the years that followed. Studies across multiple states documented shifts in public expenditure—towards water, sanitation, primary education and health care, the concerns that women who had lived with their absence understood as urgent. The transformation was uneven. Women faced, in many places, husbands who governed in their names and officials who treated them as temporary inconveniences. These problems were real and are worth documenting honestly. But the aggregate picture was unmistakable: where women governed, governance changed.
THREE DECADES OF PARLIAMENTARY FAILURE
The 81st constitutional amendment bill, which would have extended 33 per cent reservation to women in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, was introduced in 1996. What followed is legislative history that alternates between farcical and dispiriting.
The bill was torn up on the floor, blocked through procedural manoeuvre, stalled and even allowed to lapse. It would be too simple to say it was motivated purely by the straightforward reluctance of men to reduce the number of seats available to them. That was certainly a part of it. But the arguments raised against the bill deserve more than dismissal, because some of them pointed to genuine tensions.
The demand for sub-quotas for women from other backward classes had substance. Women do not constitute a homogeneous constituency, and a reservation scheme that reproduces existing hierarchies of caste in its implementation would make it a limited instrument. The concern about proxy candidates was born out of some evidence from the panchayat experience, though it also showed that many women elected initially as proxies became, over time, independent actors. These were real considerations and those who raised them deserved to be engaged rather than ignored.
What cannot be defended is the manner in which these concerns were used. The objections that had substance were deployed alongside objections that had none, in combinations that were designed to obstruct rather than improve. For instance, men who had never shown particular concern for the representation of OBC women invoked that concern precisely when it served to kill the bill.
THE WOMEN WHO KEPT IT ALIVE
What I find most instructive about the history of this bill is the alliances that formed around it, which cut across the standard lines of Indian political identity.
Pramila Dandavate, who came from the socialist tradition, brought to the cause a quality that is rarer than it sounds. She was not interested in the theatre of advocacy. She was interested in the substance of inclusion, and she worked towards it with patience and consistency. She understood exclusion as a structural condition, and she addressed it as such.
Geeta Mukherjee chaired the joint parliamentary committee on the women’s reservation bill in 1996 and 1997. The report that committee produced took seriously both the case for reservation and the complications in implementing it. She came from the Communist Party of India, whose relationship with identity-based affirmative action was not without ambivalence.
Sushma Swaraj occupied a position in this debate that I think has not been adequately acknowledged. She was, for much of her political life, in a party whose leadership was inconsistent on this question. But she herself was consistent. She gave it the weight of her own authority within her party, at moments when that authority was needed.
Uma Bharti’s contribution was of a different character. She was not a legislative tactician, but she came from a background that gave her direct knowledge of what it meant to be a woman without inherited advantages navigating structures built for others. She used that knowledge plainly and effectively.
And then there is Phoolan Devi, whose significance in this conversation I find difficult to render in the conventions of political analysis. She had been a woman subjected to forms of violence that I will not reduce to summary. She had survived those experiences, surrendered, served time and been elected by people who understood her as a representative of their own exclusions. Her presence in Parliament was not symbolic—she worked, spoke and pursued her constituents’ concerns—but her presence was also a statement about who Indian democracy was supposed to include. It was about creating space for women who the system was specifically designed to keep out. She was assassinated in 2001.
WHAT THE EVIDENCE TELLS US
In 2019, India ranked 143rd in the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s global rankings for women’s representation. Countries that have achieved substantially higher representation did so through deliberate structural intervention, not through the gradual evolution that reservation’s opponents cite as the preferable alternative.
At the state level, the picture is instructive. States that adopted 50 per cent reservation in panchayats—Bihar and Jharkhand among them—produced documented evidence of changed governance priorities. Women in governance shifted where public money went. This is not a romantic claim about female virtue. It is an empirical observation about whose priorities are reflected in policy when women voices are present in deliberation.
THE BILL THAT PASSED, AND WHAT IT DID NOT DO
As per the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, the reservation would take effect only after delimitation, and delimitation cannot begin until after a census. The government defended this sequence as constitutionally necessary—delimitation on the basis of outdated population data would be unfair to constituencies whose demographics have shifted. This may have merit as an abstract proposition.
But a government determined to see this reservation implemented promptly would have committed to a census timeline. It would have communicated clearly when delimitation would begin. The absence of such commitment, alongside the presence of considerable rhetoric about women’s empowerment, create a dissonance that is not resolved by good faith.
The women of India have kept the conversation alive election after election and government after government, and argued and documented and testified and simply refused to let the matter drop.
The National Perspective Plan that we drafted in 1988 said that political participation was not an addendum to women’s advancement but its foundation. That remains true. The census will eventually be conducted. Delimitation will eventually be completed. The reservation will eventually take effect.
What we lost, in September 2023, was not the bill. What we lost was the chance, within a foreseeable electoral cycle, of women walking into Parliament in numbers that reflected their size in this country’s population. We lost the capacity for it to tell girls, in a way that constitutional text alone cannot convey, that the institution was also theirs.
To add insult to injury, the government calls a special session in the middle of assembly elections, when the code of conduct is on, and presents an amendment to that law, making the 2011 census figures the basis and its own formula of 50 per cent increase of seats in Parliament for each state.
What was the need to rush through these amendments without consultation with opposition parties? The government did not have the required numbers and knew the amendments could not go through without consensus. Was it just a political gimmick to tell the nation that the opposition was “anti reservation for women” and influence women voters in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu? As usual, the women have become pawns in the political game. Why could there not be a one-line amendment saying that 33 per cent reservations would be implemented among the 543 members of Lok Sabha with immediate effect?
The writer is former Union minister of state