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Modi govt lost in Parliament, but India won

India’s parliamentary power was never entirely numerical. By giving voice to regions, federalism turned India into a nation. Now that national coherence is threatened by a purely numerical principle.

How should we judge the defeat of the Narendra Modi government’s 131st Constitution Amendment Bill in India’s Parliament? Can we say India has won and the government has lost? In the political life of a nation, there are moments when the defeat of an elected government becomes synonymous with the victory of the nation. This was one such moment.

To understand this, we need to go beyond the technical minutiae of the three bills. Which census should have been used as a benchmark, 2011 or 2026-27? Should the implementation of women’s reservation have been de-coupled from the delimitation bill that sought to increase the number of seats in Parliament? And should the seat increase have been equal, or proportionate to changing state populations?

A very great deal has been said about these matters. But for much of the politically active public, they constituted utter pedantry. For these citizens, the key question was different.  What was the larger purpose of the exercise?

A quota for women’s representation was not the central issue, even though that is how the BJP-led ruling alliance presented it. There was agreement across parties on increasing the number of women in Parliament. An earlier constitutional amendment in 2023, passed almost unanimously by a male-dominated Parliament, had already established that principle.

The central issue was how seats would be distributed among states and, by extension, how power would be shared in the national legislature. Because most regional parties are located in their respective states, this in effect became a question of how much influence each party would wield at the summit of the national power structure.

The BJP holds power primarily in the North and West, not in the South. If the southern proportion of seats went down and the northern proportion went up, the probability of the BJP remaining in power at the Centre would hugely go up.

Already, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), currently........

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