A hoax in the name of Women’s Reservation?: A weekly round-up on Constitution First

Yesterday, the headlines across many major dailies flashed a title that raised questions among many well-reasoned readers – ‘Opposition stands, Women’s bill falls’, suggested one of India’s most read papers, with 1.6 million readers, referring to the defeat of the passage of the 131st Constitution Amendment Bill and two other legislations. Bundled together, these bills, different from the Women’s Reservation Bill already passed in 2023, sought to expand Lok Sabha’s strength to 850 members and remove the requirement that delimitation be based on post-2026 census data, thereby permitting the use of existing figures. 

Much of the passion around the issue of women’s reservation in legislatures comes from a long, embattled history of demands – where once during the constitution framing by a ‘gentleman’s agreement’, women Constituent Assembly members trusted that the system would automatically ensure representation. By 1996, only 6.5 percent of legislators were women. 

But passions can also erode a lot of fine print. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s long address on Saturday caustically accused the Opposition of “committing a foeticide of the idea of women’s representation before the whole world, via their opposition to the move”. But it completely dodged the more significant conversation on delimitation and the unretractable bending of India’s federal and democratic structure that was really at stake. Now, in an era of wide-scale misreporting on how our legislations or our Constitution Amendment Bills are passed and how the understanding of the masses is shaped, responsible and explanatory legal reporting holds up a tremendous burden. 

The Leaflet has borne some of this responsibility – decoding the finer print major dailies deliberately missed to see. Our in-depth explainer on the now-defeated Bill, and how exactly it used women’s reservation as a ‘cover’ reached over 12,000 readers – sharply capturing concerns around transparency, simplifying the pre-legislative process and collating a neat tabulation of the changes the Amendment would have brought.