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New Delhi: The Lok Sabha on Friday rejected the Draft Constitution (131st Amendment), 2026 after the government failed to secure the special majority required to amend the Constitution despite a clear simple majority.
The bill was put to the vote with 528 votes, of which 298 were in favor and 230 were against. According to Article 368, the amendment required 352 votes, representing two-thirds of the members present and voting. The lack of 54 votes led to their defeat.
Based on the numbers, the result is not structurally surprising.
The BJP-led NDA currently has around 292 seats in the Lok Sabha, while the BJP itself has around 240 seats. Even with full attendance and alliance cohesion, the government is well below the two-thirds threshold, so the opposition’s support is essential for adoption.
The amendment proposed a major overhaul of India’s representation framework, including expanding the Lok Sabha to 850 seats, allowing delimitation based on 2011 census data and changing the implementation path of women’s reservation under the Constitution Act (106th Amendment).
The government formulated the bill as a time-critical reform for the immediate implementation of women’s reservation. Senior ministers, including Home Minister Amit Shah and Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal, called it a “historic opportunity” to ensure immediate women empowerment through legislative representation.
After the defeat, the BJP’s political message is likely to evolve towards the opposition blocking the implementation of the 33 percent quota.
The government’s broader policy calculation also appears to rely on a long-standing bipartisan position in favor of greater female representation. Over the years, opposition parties and several women leaders have publicly supported reservations in parliaments, raising expectations that it could lead to cross-party support.
This expectation was not fulfilled.
The opposition, led by figures like Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi and several regional leaders, termed the amendment a “Trojan horse”. They argued that while they supported women’s reservation in principle, the bill’s core mechanism, particularly population-based delimitation based on recent census data, would reduce the relative political weight of states that have stabilized population growth, particularly in the south and parts of eastern and northeastern India.
As a result, party discipline and federal concerns took precedence over the previous rhetorical alignment on women’s reservation, and the bill did not receive the bipartisan votes needed to close the roughly 50-60 vote gap.
The consequences are expected to extend beyond Parliament.
The issue is likely to loom large in the ongoing and upcoming assembly elections in several states, with the BJP likely to portray the vote as evidence that opposition parties are in practice denying women their 33 percent reservation. The campaign messages are expected to be aimed directly at women voters, particularly in states like West Bengal, which has a female chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, who also does not support the bill.
The opposition, in turn, is likely to respond that their stance was aimed at protecting federal balance and representation of the states and not against women’s reservation itself.
Since the bill has been defeated, the proposed expansion of the Lok Sabha is put on hold, the current delimitation framework remains unchanged and the implementation of women’s reservation continues to depend on a future census followed by delimitation as per the existing constitutional provisions.
