Delimitation and Women’s Reservation Reveal an Underlying Constitutional Tension in India
On April 17, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026 was defeated in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, having failed to attain the two-thirds majority necessary to pass. The bill sought to resolve several pending constitutional issues in India.
First, it sought to resolve the issue of delimitation — the redrawing of parliamentary constituencies based on population figures from the latest census.
India’s constituencies are currently based on the 1971 census, delimitation having been frozen in 1976 to incentivize states to slow population growth. But some states, especially in North India, have higher fertility rates than states in South India. They therefore have a larger portion of the population than they did in 1971. The recent amendment sought to conduct delimitation based on the 2011 census, along with expanding the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats. The amendment having failed, delimitation will proceed on the basis of the 2027 census, as the freeze of 1976 is due to expire this year. Many smaller states, mostly in the south, oppose delimitation and view it as punishment for implementing successful family planning policies.
Second, the bill sought to implement the Constitution (128th Amendment) Bill, 2023, which reserves one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies for women. Contrary to some reporting, the constitution has already been successfully amended in 2023 to include women’s reservation. Women’s reservation will be implemented after the next census and delimitation exercise. Therefore, the question is just a matter of when and under which census that women’s reservation will be implemented.
There is a large issue at stake here: the tension between the right for individuals to be represented as individuals and group rights. In India, the struggle to transcend group political action can take both the form of classical liberals defending individualism and the Hindu right seeking to weld together various caste and linguistic groups into a single Hindu voting bloc.
Reservations for women and the quest to freeze delimitation both share the principle of group-based or corrective representation. Both seek to empower underrepresented groups — women and less-populous states — at the expense of the principles of electoral equality and proportional representation. In India, an adult individual can stand for election to parliament anywhere, regardless of that person’s gender or caste, and represent the same number of people, whether in Uttar Pradesh or Tamil Nadu.
A complex, multilingual and multicultural federal polity such as India will likely have to make some compromises when it comes to federalism. Some proposals that seek to solve this issue include creating an upper house of parliament with equal representation for states, like the United States Senate, breaking up larger states like Uttar Pradesh, and devolving more powers to states, with the federal government mostly limiting itself to foreign affairs, security, and maintaining a common currency. Some or a combination of several of these proposals may work to resolve regional tensions. But delimitation cannot be frozen forever, because it implies that some people are entitled to greater representation than others by virtue of happening to live in one state and not the other.
Passing an amendment to the constitution to create reservations for women met much less resistance than delimitation. The amendment passed almost unanimously, perhaps because no political party would have been able to deal with the electoral fallout of opposing it. Yet it must be observed that women’s reservation in government is also an element of a larger trend for more and more groups to demand, and receive, reservations and quotas.
Historically, before urban modernity, Indian society has largely been a society of societies insofar as its basic building blocks are groups, rather than the individual. These groups — the thousands of jatis (sub-castes), religious sects and minorities, ethnic, regional, tribal — all have their own traditions and customs, and in many cases, occupational roles, that have only begun to weaken due to sociopolitical reform and the power of the free market. Centuries of intermarriage within communities and particular dietary practices have strengthened the insular identities of many of these groups.
The modern Constitution of India is layered upon this reality. Largely the product of Western-educated lawyers and jurists like Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, and Benegal Narsing Rau, the constitution enshrined many of the principles of liberal democracy, such as the rights of individuals to life (Article 21) — a notion that has subsequently expanded to include the right to work, food, and education — free expression, trial, and property.
These rights are not particularly contested insofar as they do not interfere with the primary concern of India’s many groups, most of which are a numerical minority in relation to India’s population. For example, Dalits (formerly “Untouchables”) form 16.6 percent of the population, tribals 8.6 percent, Brahmins around 5 percent, Rajputs between 4 and 8 percent, and Muslims, which do not form a single bloc anyway, around 15 percent. When it comes to ethnolinguistic groups — which are also fractured by caste and religion — no language’s speakers other than Hindi’s constitute even 10 percent of India’s population.
What groups in India often seek are collective rights and representation: protection, privileges, and quotas in order to safeguard their interests, especially if they are minorities or have historically been underrepresented despite large numbers. Women and Dalits fall into the second group. Reservations have led to demands for reservations from almost all groups: ultimately, everyone wants their share of the pie.
Often, groups want to both access the institutions of the state in order to avail themselves of the benefits of affirmative action and reservations and to be free from state interference when it comes to their customs.
During the drafting of the Indian constitution, a number of groups from all across India’s social spectrum, whether from Brahmin communities or backward castes, made similar demands: freedom of worship and autonomy to manage their own community, including the right to expel those who did not conform. What they wanted was dignity as a whole for their group, and not to be imposed upon by other groups — for example, not being forced to be a cleaner as a Dalit — not the dissolution of their group. It is in this spirit that recent bills were passed in Gujarat and Maharashtra to make it more difficult for individuals to marry across caste and religious lines, the purpose of which is to maintain group cohesion at the expense of individual rights. It is important to understand that such an initiative is not largely the product of a government pushing legislation onto an unwilling population. Rather, it is the product of a government responding to the illiberal instincts of parents, communities, and elders, contrary to the more liberal principles laid down in India’s constitution. Modernity and the internet are deepening individual choices, but communities are fighting back. In a way, politics has “caught up” with the ground reality of India.
From its inception, therefore, the Constitution of India has had to deviate from the principles of liberal democracy and concede group rights due to India’s particular social conditions and popular opinion. Initially, this was in the form of affirmative action for what seemed to be noble and limited cases: uplifting India’s most oppressed and destitute groups. Articles 330 and 332 provided for reserved seats — though not separate electorates — for Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Scheduled Castes (SCs) or Dalits in India’s parliament and in state assemblies. According to Article 334, these provisions were supposed to expire 10 years after the inception of India’s constitution (in 1960), but have been extended every 10 years, to the present, by constitutional amendment. This goes to show how quotas become entrenched. Today, there are caste-based quotas in the public sector and in educational institutions.
But the constitution also enshrined group rights in other ways. Religious communities — Hindus, Muslims, and Christians — maintained separate personal laws, laws that deal with family affairs such as marriage and inheritance. Today, there are demands for reservation for Muslims and other religious groups in parliament.
Empowering disempowered groups, along with resolving injustice, is important in a democratic country such as India. It is the original impetus behind reservations and delayed delimitation. But the institutionalization of so many collective rights can lead to a cascade whereby an increasingly large number of rights and benefits in the Indian polity are attained through membership of a group, rather than as an individual citizen of India. These questions should not be delayed or avoided. Indians must ask themselves what type of country and constitutional system they want and how to balance both individual and group rights and power between different groups.
