New Delhi: Questions arise about the most recent whim of the Narendra Modi government, of advancing the date for the implementation of the 128th Constitutional Amendment passed in 2023, ensuring that one-third of the seats in parliament and state legislatures will be reserved for women, after the first census after 2026 and delimitation that is to follow.Why now?Why has the Modi government found it necessary to suddenly bring in women’s reservation now? Does it perhaps wish to change the lay of the land before the Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab elections next year? Jairam Ramesh, Congress leader, Rajya Sabha MP and chairman of the party’s communications department, writes that the reservation of one-third seats in constituencies for general category, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities, was to “become operational after the delimitation and census exercises would get completed.” Ramesh adds, “When the Nari Vandan Adhiniyam, 2023 was being debated, the Indian National Congress had demanded its immediate implementation from the 2024 Lok Sabha elections itself. The Modi Govt said this was not possible since both delimitation and the census had to necessarily be completed first. Now the U-turn Ustad has, after 30 months, suddenly changed his mind and wants to implement the reservations WITHOUT completing the delimitation and census operations.”U-turns on their own policies, brought in by the same government and less than three years ago on a constitutional question, with grave repercussions on the polity have to be thought through. It is a question as to why the government cannot wait for delimitation to take place after the census and must hustle now. What has changed to suddenly?2. What is the fear associated with the 2026 census? Is it because it is a caste census? The Tamil Nadu chief minister, M.K. Stalin, has welcomed women’s reservation, but urged caution on how delimitation is being sought now to be done in a hurry to perhaps make the political terrain easy for the BJP in state elections next year it has a lot at stake in. Stalin has said, “This step is not in line with The Constitution (128th Amendment) Bill, 2023 passed by the Union BJP Government and its earlier position to take up this historic initiative only after delimitation is carried out based on the Census conducted after 2026. This is most probably aimed at securing electoral gains in the forthcoming Assembly elections in four major States.” He, along with his sister and DMK leader in parliament, K. Kanimozhi, has backed women’s reservation, “as the President of the DMK and the proud inheritor of the Dravidian legacy that has spearheaded women’s empowerment for more than a century, I fully support this initiative of #WomensReservation without any preconditions, while at the same time stressing our right to fair delimitation. It is our consistent stand that the current proportional representation of States should not be disturbed under any circumstances. To achieve this, the delimitation and distribution of constituencies among States must include a constitutional provision ensuring the same for the next 30 years.”The Modi government has not made any formal disclosures about how 50% of seats are to be increased. Newspaper reports say that Lok Sabha seats would increase to 816 from 543. The Economic Times has a number chart on how seats would change within the states, but the weight of the states relative to each other would be the same. Their would be no increase on Lok Sabha MPs from one-MP states of Sikkim, Nagaland and Mizoram, but their state assemblies would see an increase in seats. Delimitation has been a thorny subject which the BJP has been absolutely quiet on. A crude population division would simply cripple political power of peninsular India’s states which serve as economic (and employment generation) engines of India and have succeeded in stabilising populations. This would mean rewarding states that have not been able to control their Total Fertility Rates, like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. As politics of states which would gain are seen to be historically at odds with what is going on in states which have managed to pull themselves up, this would not be a simple statistical call.The last delimitation in India was before the 2009 general elections, but then, too, the number of seats did not change. It was in 1972 that the last distribution of Lok Sabha and state assembly seats was done. The decision to increase seats was postponed to the 2001 census, and then to 2026 by the 84th amendment in 2001. The logic being that by then, population in the northern states would have stabilised.The 2026 census is on and is a landmark one as it will reveal caste details for the first time in independent India. Why then suddenly would the government reverse a constitutional amendment passed only in 2023 and rely on 2011, a census that is 15 years old? Is there a worry that data revealed in the caste census will illuminate caste backwardness amongst OBC groups that would merit a re-apportioning of women’s seats accordingly too? 3. The sanctity of the Model Code of ConductDespite the Model Code of Conduct being in place, INDIA parties are sceptical of this announcement bang in the middle of electioneering. The Model Code of Conduct, with the withering reputation of the Election Commission, has been termed by the Opposition as the “Modi Code of Conduct”. Why move for such a big shift just now, in the next fortnight, and not after the election process is over on April 29?There have been attempts to brief some parties, as Deccan Herald reports. The Trinamool Congress, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Communist Party of India (Marxist) also did not meet Shah, though parties like the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar), Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), YSR Congress Party and Biju Janata Dal did. A senior TMC leader called the government move a “purely political stunt”, as per the newspaper.Opposition members of the INDIA alliance have signed a letter written by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to Union minister for parliamentary affairs Kiren Rijiju seeking an all-party meeting to be convened to discuss the implementation where opposition parties have reiterated their demand for the all-party meeting to be held after the upcoming assembly elections, to discuss proposed amendments to the Act, and said that “to make the meeting more productive, it is necessary for the Government to circulate a note detailing what exactly is being proposed.” The letter by Kharge, who is also the leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha, has been signed by members of the opposition, including from the Samajwadi Party, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar), Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, and Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. TMC is the only party that is not a signatory to this letter.The letter states that Kharge had earlier written to Rijiju on March 16, requesting for an all-party meeting chaired by the prime minister at the earliest to discuss as desired by the government the “modalities and roadmap for the implementation of the Nari Vandan Adhiniyam, 2023.”“It appears that the Government is now planning a further Amendment to the Constitution Amendment passed in September 2023,” the letter says.“To make the meeting more productive, it is necessary for the government to circulate a note detailing what exactly is being proposed. The all-party meeting should be held after the current round of assembly elections is completed on April 29.”4. What happened to pre-legislative consultation? The three agricultural bills passed in the middle of COVID-19 in 2020, by a voice vote, with no committees scrutinising the merits of the bills as well as no pre-legislative consultation with farmer groups led to a massive agitation by farmers and eventual retraction of the three farmer laws, personally announced by Modi.But no lessons on even information about important policy decisions appear to have been learnt, far less about consultation with several groups and sets of people affected by this decision. In this case, the entire country. So what has happened to pre legislative consultation that the government that preceded the Modi government paid heed to? In a reply to a parliamentary question on February 10, 2022, the then-Minister for Law and Justice, Kirin Rijiju admitted that “the Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy was formulated by the Committee of Secretaries under the Chairmanship of Cabinet Secretary on 10th January, 2014 and every Ministry/Department is required to adhere to the decision taken there under and give effect to the said policy.” But, he said, the “Ministry of Law and Justice does not maintain any record relating to compliance by the Ministries/Departments with the Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy.”He further admitted that while “Paragraph 9.2 (a) of Chapter 9 of the Manual of Parliamentary Procedure in the Government of India provides that the Ministry/Department concerned will formulate the legislative proposals in consultation with all the interested persons and authorities concerned, including a discussion on the necessity for the proposed legislation and all matters of substance to be embodied therein. Every Ministry/Department has to comply with this requirement.”But, citing the exception to that, made clear that it had been cast by the wayside. “However, paragraph 11 of the Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy gives sufficient leeway for the Ministry/Department to eschew the Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy on the ground that it is not feasible or desirable so to do.”