The Trinamool Congress on Thursday (April 16, 2026) said amendments being brought in for implementing the women’s reservation Act were actually a “disguise” for altering the electoral process of the country and bringing in delimitation of constituencies.

Questioning the “hurriedness” in bringing in the Constitutional Amendment Bill for implementation of the women’s quota, TMC MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, while participating in the discussion in the Lok Sabha, said her party demanded that 50% of seats should be reserved for women, because Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee had given more than 33% of seats to women whenever there had been an electoral contest.

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She questioned as to why the government had suddenly brought the Bill. “Our leader Ms. Banerjee had demanded 28 years ago in this very House that women’s reservation be enacted. The budget session began on January 28 and if this was so important for you, then why wasn’t this law brought in before”.

Ms. Ghosh Dastidar said her party had demanded a special session during Pahalgam as well as Operation Sindoor, but it was not done and what was so important about the law that it had to be brought in the middle of ongoing spate of Assembly elections.

“Women’s reservation is a disguise to alter election process and harm democracy,” she added.

The Barasat MP also expressed apprehensions that the proposed delimitation commission would be “authoritarian just like the Election Commission of India”.

On the composition and powers of the delimitation commission, TMC MP Pratima Mondal, who also participated in the discussion, said that without judicial review, the delimitation commission would be a mere “formality”.

Ms. Mondal said what the government was proposing was not women’s reservation, but electoral engineering disguised as “nari shakti (women’s empowerment)”.

She claimed that the fear of losing in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu and some other States had forced the BJP to bring in the women’s reservation law.

“Women’s reservation Bill is for BJP, Mr. Modi and Mr. Shah a weapon to win elections. It is a political issue for them”.

Ms. Mondal further said that by not including the caste census data in the delimitation and implementation of the women’s reservation, the government was denying the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe women their constitutional right.

Earlier, when Ms. Ghosh Dastidar said the Aparajita Bill which had been brought in by the West Bengal government in the aftermath of the RG Kar rape and murder case had not been cleared by the Centre, Union Women and Child Development Minister Annapurna Devi intervened to say that West Bengal was yet to operationalise the fast track courts set up to try crimes against women.