18 April 2026
Modi’s plan to expand Parliament related to reservation for women fails in vote
In a major blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, his proposal to expand the Parliament of India to increase women’s representation failed after it was not able to garner enough votes in the lower house, the Lok Sabha.
The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026 was introduced in a special sitting of Parliament earlier this week and was voted on after two days of intense deliberations.
How did the bill fail?
Reservation for women MLAs was linked to a controversial bill to redraw constituency boundaries across India on the basis of population.
While the women’s quota was supported across the political spectrum, proposals for redrawing constituencies, called delimitation, faced intense opposition from the opposition.
Opposition parties expressed concern that the exercise would primarily benefit Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He accused the ruling government of manipulating the system and using the women’s quota issue as a ploy to get more votes ahead of the 2029 elections.
The government had claimed that the constituency changes were needed to reflect changes in population as the seats were last decided after the census in 1971.
In the end, the bill failed to achieve the special two-thirds majority required for passage.
Of the total 528 members present and voting, 298 members voted in favor and 230 against it.
“The amendment bill has failed. They used an unconstitutional ploy in the name of women to break the Constitution,” opposition leader Rahul Gandhi wrote on Twitter just after the vote.
The Modi government has rejected the claims and said it will continue to campaign for women’s reservation.
“The women of this country will not forgive you,” Home Minister Amit Shah said in Parliament before the vote.
Why is Parliament Extension Bill important?
If passed, the measure could significantly reshape India’s electoral landscape since Indian independence in 1947.
The delimitation process will increase the number of seats in the lower house by two-fifths by the time of the next general election in 2029.
India’s southern states were concerned that population-based delimitation would unfairly skew political representation in favor of northern states, where population growth has been higher.
Modi and Shah assured Parliament that the current proportional representation of the southern states would remain almost unchanged and would not be affected by delimitation.
The law passed in 2023 approved 33% reservation for women in the national parliament and state assemblies, but then linked it to the next census, which is currently underway.
This means the changes would have extended beyond the 2029 elections.
The vote is the first time that the Modi government has failed to pass a constitutional amendment bill since it came to power in 2014.