Muslim quota demand sets off clash in Lok Sabha as women’s reservation, delimitation Bills are introduced

After the Bills were introduced by Union Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal, senior Congress MP K C Venugopal said his party had asked the government to implement women’s reservation in 2024 itself and asked why the government did not do so.

Venugopal said the government itself had introduced the 2023 Bill and was now saying that women’s quota cannot be implemented as per the law. He said the intention was to take away the protections offered by Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee — a reference to the 1976 and 2001 freeze on delimitation — and hijack the process. Venugopal demanded that the Bills be withdrawn.

Dharmendra Yadav then lit the spark in the House by calling for reservation for Muslim and OBC women. The SP MP said the delinking of delimitation and the Census was against the Constitution. “Till OBC and Muslim women are not added to it, the SP will oppose it (the Bill),” he said.

Rijiju said reservation for Muslim women was unconstitutional, as quota cannot be granted on the grounds of religion. “Talk about women of the whole country and not about Muslim women alone,” the minister said.

SP president Akhilesh Yadav responded to this by asking if the government was in a “tearing hurry” because if the Census happens, caste count will happen, and then the SP will ask for representation. At this point, Amit Shah said what had been said about Muslim women was a matter of concern and reiterated that reservation on the religious ground was unconstitutional. Akhilesh then sought to know if Muslim women were not part of the aadhi aabadi.

Other Opposition leaders also came out against the Bills. While Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar of the TMC opposed them on her party’s behalf, Revolutionary Socialist Party MP NK Premchandran questioned the legislative competence of the Constitutional Amendment Bill, as it is for delimitation and not for women’s reservation. He told the House that the 2023 Act is already in existence for women’s reservation.

T R Baalu of the DMK opposed the introduction of the three “sandwich” Bills, saying that the DMK is in support of the women’s reservation law passed in 2023 and added that it was not necessary to bring another Bill. Party chief and Tamil Nadu CM M K Stalin had shown black flags and “burnt the Bill”, he said.

AIMIM president and MP Asaduddin Owaisi opposed the Bills and said they violate federalism, a basic structure of the Constitution. He added that by removing the delimitation freeze, the government was denying the states had controlled their populations their fair share. A minister has to give seven days’ notice to introduce a Bill, which has been violated, Owaisi said.

A first from SP

This is the first time that the SP has openly demanded a Muslim quota within women’s reservation. While the party has, along with the RJD, demanded an OBC quota within women’s reservation since 1996, it decided to climb down on its old demand by supporting the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, as the women’s quota law is known, in 2023.

Thus, for the first time since a Bill to reserve seats for women was introduced in 1996 under Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda, the social justice parties — which once saw the “forward versus backward” discourse as the central fault line of Indian politics — cautiously agreed to put their stamp of approval on the legislation with no OBC quota within the Bill.

There were several reasons for the Mandal parties coming around on the issue in 2023: the emergence of women as voters, caste politics fragmenting into multiple individual caste interests (many of whom vote for the BJP), the falling charisma of the Mandal leadership in Parliament, and the depleting numbers of the SP and RJD in the House.

After the legislation was introduced for the first time in 1996, Janata Dal leader Sharad Yadav had contemptuously said women’s reservation would benefit only “parkati mahila”, a barb meant to imply urban, largely upper caste and upper class women. In 2010, by then in the JD(U), Yadav was snubbed by party chief Nitish Kumar who decided to support the Bill in the Rajya Sabha, brought at the time by the UPA government.