Women’s reservation is a powerful idea whose time has come. But it cannot be delivered by decree

It was hardly unexpected that after the constitutional amendment on women’s reservation collapsed in Lok Sabha — the Narendra Modi government having tied it to seat expansion and a prior delimitation exercise — the BJP would cast the Opposition as anti-women and claim sole ownership of the cause. That said, Prime Minister Modi’s address to the nation on Saturday only seemed to deepen, rather than dissolve, the distrust that brought his government to that defeat in the House. By using the national pulpit to denounce political opponents in the thick of election campaigns, reaching for words like bhrun hatya (foeticide), paap (sin), and sazaa (retribution), the address further shrinks the space for any meaningful conversation on the way forward. This matters especially because the government’s conduct through the episode bore the hallmarks of its reflexive, winner-takes-all style: No all-party meeting to build the constitutional consensus such an amendment demands; no serious engagement with the legitimate questions raised about process and outcome. A government that governs by electoral majority rather than by deliberation cannot then be surprised when deliberation fails it.

But there is, there should be, a distinction between the BJP’s political calculation and the obligations of a BJP-led government. By smudging the line between the partisan and the prime-ministerial, the PM narrows the very frame he has, at other times, sought to enlarge by positioning himself above the fray. As the head of a fractious and argumentative democracy, his responsibility is not merely to table legislation he deems necessary, but to navigate the concerns it legitimately stirs. In this case, there were apprehensions about a hasty delimitation reordering the political map and disturbing the delicate equilibrium between representation and federalism. In the aftermath of Friday’s defeat, the PM and his team, in both party and government, owe themselves an honest reckoning with the trust deficit they so visibly failed to bridge. Labelling the Congress — he mostly named Congress alone and sometimes alongside TMC, DMK, SP — as intrinsically anti-reform, and using epithets like “parasite”, “saboteur”, and the well-worn “dynastic”, only hardens the breakdown of communication that produced the denouement in the first place.

The ongoing elections will run their course, the poll dust will settle. But women’s reservation — on which political consensus still broadly holds, even after the Bill’s fall — remains a promise deferred, not abandoned. How should the legislature be expanded to accommodate women’s reservation? How can the conversation address north-versus-south anxieties, genuinely reckon with caste, and find a formulation that unites rather than divides? What needs to be done to ensure integrity of the delimitation process? These are not questions that can be answered by fiat. They demand negotiation, patient, inclusive, and in good faith. The table for that must be set again, and it falls to the Prime Minister to do it. Women’s reservation is a powerful idea whose time has come. But it cannot be delivered by decree, nor pushed through a House so evidently fractured and mistrustful. To try and do so would not be to honour the idea, it would only diminish it.