MPs stand for Vande Matram before the adjournment of Lok Sabha on the last day of the Budget Session (2026-27) of Parliament, in New Delhi on Saturday (file photo). | Photo Credit: ANI

The defeat of the Constitution (One Hundred and Thirty-First Amendment) Bill, 2026 in the Lok Sabha raises questions about why a special session of Parliament was convened in the midst of Assembly elections to hastily pass a highly contentious Constitutional amendment. Given the sensitivity of the issue, it should’ve been obvious that such a Bill would not pass the Lok Sabha amidst elections in a couple of the very States that would be undercut by its provisions. Yet, political calculations seem to have been behind the move as seen by how Prime Minister Narendra Modi immediately launched into the Opposition for what he called “female foeticide”.

The fallen Bill was a radical departure from the existing Constitutional scheme freezing the number of seats in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies based on the 1971 census. No increase in the total number of seats can occur until the first census after 2026 is published. The 2026 Bill proposed to omit the provisions in Articles 82 and 170 that enforce this freeze. Most significantly, it proposed redefining “population” on the basis of the “population figures of the latest published census”. This would have allowed the government to use 2011 census data to increase the seats immediately. It simultaneously proposed an expansion in the number of Lok Sabha seats to 850 (815 from States and 35 from Union Territories). It then sought to amend the existing Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam — which granted 33 per cent reservation for women but explicitly stated that it would come into effect only after a delimitation exercise following the “first census taken after 2023” has been completed, a provision that pushed implementation of women’s reservation to after 2029.

One cannot argue against the Constitutional principle enshrined in Article 81(2)(a) guaranteeing “one person, one vote, one value”, which necessarily involves seat expansion on the basis of population. But there is a reason why successive governments — the last being the one led by the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee — ensured that the number of Lok Sabha seats that each State has remained frozen. It prevented the representation of five southern States from falling from 24.3 per cent to 20.7 per cent and put a stop to increase in representation of northern States by 5 per cent. The related amendments in the Constitution dictated that this arrangement would be valid until the first census after 2026. The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam in 2023 inserted Article 334A into the Constitution, linking the implementation of women’s reservation to the first census and delimitation taken after this legislation was enacted.

The government now sought to accelerate implementation by tethering women’s reservation to the 2011 Census. While constituency size needs to be adjusted for population, anxieties of southern States must be addressed. This process has to be a masterclass in trust-building. It cannot be achieved by forcing Constitutional amendments amidst an active election cycle.

Published on April 19, 2026