Women's quota or rigging?

The Indian government's proposed legislation to expand the Lok Sabha to 850 seats from its current strength of 543 is, on the face of it, a landmark move aimed primarily at increasing women's representation in parliament. The government says it wants to "operationalise" the 33% women's reservation law ahead of the 2029 general elections - with the goal of correcting a significant democratic deficit. India is relatively slow out of the gates - Pakistan has had a similar women's representation law on the books for over 70 years, and according to the current formula, reserves 60 of its 336 seats in the National Assembly for women, or almost 18% of all seats.

While seat reservation is not a perfect solution to increasing women's representation - the vast majority of women on reserved seats in Pakistan owe their positions to family and financial ties, rather than activism or personal achievements - in India, the opposition is voicing much deeper concerns about the ruling BJP using the law to mask a gerrymandering exercise to guarantee it more seats. This is because the opposition is worried that the BJP will, among other things, try to use unverified data from the upcoming census to map constituencies in a way that is favourable to it during delimitation. The law also appears to reward states that failed to implement national population control initiatives while penalising states that did the job right. Unsurprisingly, most of the worst-run states are BJP strongholds, and they would see their seats raised disproportionately if they were also given an imbalanced number of reserved seats.

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has personally assured lawmakers that the proportional representation of states will remain unchanged and that no injustice will be done, Modi, to put it lightly, is not a man of his word, and his refusal to give the opposition written assurances within the legislation is a genuine cause for concern.