On April 21, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath led a ‘Jan Akrosh Mahila Padyatra’ (public outrage women’s march) from his official residence on Kalidas Marg to the Vidhan Sabha in Lucknow, a distance of roughly 1.75 kilometres, in protest against the opposition’s vote against the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill in the Lok Sabha four days earlier.

The bill had sought to trigger women’s reservation by linking it to delimitation based on the 2011 Census and an expansion of the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats. On April 17, it received 298 votes in favour and 230 against—54 short of the two-thirds majority required. It was the first Constitutional Amendment Bill to be defeated in the Lok Sabha in the 12 years of the Narendra Modi government.

The march in Lucknow drew Cabinet Ministers, both Deputy Chief Ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak, MLAs, and leaders of NDA allies Apna Dal, the Nishad Party, and the Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party. Addressing the crowd, Adityanath described the march as a symbol of women’s anger against the Congress, Samajwadi Party (SP), the Trinamool Congress (TMC), and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).

Slogans accused the SP of backing away whenever women’s representation was at stake—a reference to the party’s opposition in Parliament during the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) tenure when the Women’s Reservation Bill was introduced. “SaPa Ki Pehchan, Naari Shakti Ka Apman” (The identity of the Samajwadi Party is the insult of women’s power) was the day’s refrain.

SP chief Akhilesh Yadav rejected the charge, accusing the BJP of reducing women’s empowerment to a slogan—turning naari (woman) into naara (slogan)—and of governing through fear rather than rights.

The BJP’s response to the bill’s defeat has been swift and State-specific. Chief Minister Adityanath has convened a special session of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly on April 30 on women’s empowerment. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to address a women’s convention, the Mahila Sammelan, on April 28 in Varanasi, his parliamentary constituency, with the BJP working to mobilise over 50,000 women for the event.

At an election rally in Tamil Nadu—one of the States that went to the polls this month—Modi compared the opposition’s conduct to bhroon hatya (female foeticide). Home Minister Amit Shah told his Tamil Nadu audience that women would not forgive the opposition for voting down the bill. On April 17, after the bill fell, Adityanath had invoked the imagery of cheerharan—the disrobing of Draupadi in the Mahabharata—to describe the role of the INDIA bloc, comprising the Congress, SP, TMC, and DMK.

With polling in Tamil Nadu concluding on April 23 and West Bengal’s phased elections underway, the BJP now has over a year to shape a women-centric political narrative in Uttar Pradesh, where Assembly elections are due in early 2027.

Women BJP supporters in Varanasi have already staged street protests, raising slogans against the opposition and publicly cautioning their husbands against voting for opposition parties, with some threatening a kitchen strike. Manju Shiwach, BJP MLA from Modi Nagar, shared photographs on her Facebook page of women burning an effigy representing the opposition, arguing that the bill’s defeat denied women their 33 per cent share.

The urgency behind the campaign stems partly from 2024. In the Lok Sabha elections, the SP—powered by its Picchda (backwards), Dalit, Alpasankhyak (minority) or PDA coalition—pushed the BJP to its lowest seat tally in Uttar Pradesh across the last three Lok Sabha elections. Facing a likely third consecutive term bid in 2027, and a fatigue factor that analysts point to as a structural vulnerability, the ruling party appears to be searching for a constituency that cuts across caste.

Bihar’s lesson, UP’s constraints

The strategy has precedent elsewhere. In neighbouring Bihar, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar built a loyal women’s support base across caste lines, despite his own caste base being smaller than that of Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal. In Jharkhand, JMM leader Hemant Soren cultivated women voters through the Maiya Samman Yojana, a monthly cash transfer scheme. In Madhya Pradesh, former Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s support among women voters is widely credited with rescuing the BJP in the 2023 Assembly election.

Whether the approach can be replicated in Uttar Pradesh is less certain. Unlike Bihar and Jharkhand—which share borders and a shared political history—UP has not yet produced a women-led voting bloc that operates independently of caste. The BJP has made sustained efforts, through schemes such as the Ujjwala Yojana (free LPG connections) and by projecting itself as a guarantor of security against lawlessness attributed to the SP. These have not coalesced into a consolidated women’s vote. Analysts attribute this to the deeply patriarchal character of society in the Hindi heartland.

The State has a long roll call of prominent women. Among freedom fighters, Begum Hazrat Mahal, Rani Lakshmi Bai, Jhalkari Bai, Aruna Asaf Ali, Sarojini Naidu (who went on to become the country’s first woman Governor), and Vijay Lakshmi Pandit (the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly) all had roots in the State. In October 1963, Sucheta Kripalani became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh—the first woman to hold that office in any Indian State.

Yet few women leaders in subsequent decades rose outside dynastic or mentorship networks. Even Mayawati, who served four terms as Chief Minister and was the country’s first Dalit woman to hold that office, built her base on Dalit politics and Kanshi Ram’s social engineering rather than on any women’s consolidation. Dimple Yadav’s identity in UP politics remains principally that of Akhilesh Yadav’s wife and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s daughter-in-law. Rita Bahuguna Joshi is the daughter of Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna. Sheila Dikshit, who won her first election from Kannauj, was the daughter-in-law of Umashankar Dikshit. Meira Kumar, the first woman Speaker of the Lok Sabha, who began her political career in Bijnor, is the daughter of former Deputy Prime Minister Jagjivan Ram.

In the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, 47 women won seats in the Legislative Assembly—up from 42 in 2017. Of these, 23 belong to the BJP, which also won the most seats overall, taking 255 of 403. The SP has 14 women MLAs out of its 111 legislators; the Congress has one; and Apna Dal (Soneylal) has two. Prominent women members of the current Assembly include Baby Rani Maurya, Aditi Singh, Aradhana Misra, and Pallavi Patel.

Among the women Members of Parliament from UP in the current Lok Sabha are the SP’s Dimple Yadav, Iqra Chaudhary, Priya Saroj, Ruchi Vira, and Krishna Devi. The BJP’s women MPs include Hema Malini, a three-term MP from Mathura, along with Kiran Choudhary and Rekha Verma. From NDA ally Apna Dal (Soneylal) comes Union Minister Anupriya Patel.

In 2022, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra led the Congress’s State campaign under the ‘Ladki Hoon Lad Sakti Hoon’ (I am a girl, and I can fight) banner and fielded 159 women candidates—roughly a third of the party’s total. The Congress won two seats, one of them by a woman, and its vote share fell sharply to 2.33 per cent from 6.33 per cent in 2017.

The opposition’s counter-move

The opposition’s counter-strategy rests on a straightforward argument: the 2023 Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam—the 106th Constitutional Amendment, passed unanimously in September that year—already guarantees 33 per cent reservation for women in the existing 543-seat Lok Sabha and State assemblies. The INDIA bloc accused the government of using the women’s issue as cover for a delimitation exercise that, critics argue, would reduce the representation of southern States in Parliament.

At a Tamil Nadu rally, Rahul Gandhi said that if the BJP wanted a women’s bill, it should implement the 2023 act immediately, and the entire opposition would back it. Priyanka Gandhi echoed the argument at a press conference in Delhi. In Lucknow, opposition parties have rolled out a counter-strategy as the BJP sharpens its pitch through the Chief Minister’s Statewide padyatra in support of the rights of “aadhi aabadi” (half the population).

On social media, posts resurfaced citing a 2010 interview with Adityanath in which he reportedly said that women who acquire masculine traits become demons, and reportedly opposed the Women’s Reservation Bill at that time. During the UPA tenure, BJP leader and prominent OBC voice Gopinath Munde had advocated for an OBC sub-quota within the proposed legislation—a demand also advanced by the SP, the RJD, and Sharad Yadav of the Janata Dal (United).

The BJP does not appear to have publicly addressed either the 2010 remarks or Munde’s position in its current campaign.

What the campaign must also navigate is a statistical inconvenience. The final voter list released by the Election Commission on April 10, 2026, following Uttar Pradesh’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, recorded a women voter ratio of 834 per 1,000 men—down from 877 per 1,000 men before the revision began in October 2025. The SIR deleted over 2.04 crore voters from the rolls, with a higher proportion of the deletions involving women, according to Election Commission data. Opposition parties have raised concerns about the exercise.

Whether the BJP’s women-centric campaign translates into electoral gains in 2027 remains to be seen. What is less in doubt is that the issue will feature in the Uttar Pradesh elections at a scale that was absent in 2022.

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