New Delhi: For the first time in 12 years, the Narendra Modi government on Friday (April 17) failed to get a constitutional amendment Bill passed. In a major setback to it, a united opposition defeated the constitutional amendment Bill that sought to increase the strength of the Lok Sabha to 850 seats to “operationalise” women’s reservation.While Union home minister Amit Shah in the Lok Sabha criticised the opposition and said that the “women of the country will not forgive” them, opposition members hailed its victory in defeating the constitutional amendment brought under the guise of women empowerment.During the voting on Friday, the second day of the special session, 298 votes were polled in favour and 230 against the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, which thus failed to receive support from a two-thirds majority of members present and voting that it required to clear the Lok Sabha. A total of 528 MPs were present, of which the government needed 352, and fell short by 54 votes.The Modi government had on Thursday brought the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026 along with the Delimitation Bill, 2026 and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026 as a three-Bill package to “operationalise” women’s reservation.The Women’s Reservation Act, 2023 had been passed in September that year unanimously in parliament. However, that legislation tied 33% reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and state legislatures to the next census and delimitation.The Wire has reported that the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, along with its accompanying delimitation Bill, sought to bring in large-scale changes that would not just increase the strength of the Lok Sabha to 850 but result in a fundamentally altered parliamentary arithmetic and change Union-state relations.On Friday, facing a tough floor test where the government lacked the numbers to get the constitutional amendment Bill passed, Amit Shah opened his reply to the discussion by blaming the opposition for not supporting women’s reservation.“They are not opposing its implementation but women’s reservation itself,” he said.In his over-hour-long speech, Shah repeatedly criticised the opposition for not supporting women’s reservation, without mentioning that the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act was passed unanimously by parliament three years ago.Opposition members through the discussion held over Thursday and Friday maintained that they supported women’s reservation but criticised the government for attempting to bring fundamental changes to the Constitution by seeking to increase the strength of the Lok Sabha, alongside a contentious delimitation exercise tied to the “latest published census” – implying the 15-year-old 2011 census – and tying the 33% women’s quota to it.Shah’s reply saw heated exchanges with the opposition as they sought to know why the promised 50% uniform increase in seats across states was not mentioned in the text of the Bill.Congress MP K.C. Venugopal demanded to know if the government would put its words of assurance in writing.“We are asking the home minister if the government is ready to delink women’s reservation from delimitation and whether they will put the 50% increase across all seats in writing.”Shah responded by saying that the government is “ready to bring an amendment” in an hour.“Adjourn the House for an hour and I will bring this amendment. Because we want to increase seats by 50%. We will do it,” he said.Samajwadi Party MP Akhilesh Yadav then rose to say that the experience of the last 12 years shows that “even if the BJP says they will appoint a female prime minister, we will not believe them”.Opposition members had raised concerns that the constitutional amendment tied to the 2011 census, if passed, would disadvantage those states that had seen their population growth rates decline relatively fast since 1971, following which a freeze on delimitation was imposed.Shah, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union minister for law and justice Arjun Ram Meghwal had on Thursday said that the strength of the Lok Sabha would be increased through a 50% uniform rise in seats across all states, even as the Bills made no mention of this.Through his reply, Shah continued to blame the opposition for not supporting women and said that if the opposition failed to vote for the Bill, the women of the country would respond through their votes.“I know that if they [the opposition] don’t vote this Bill will fall, but the women of the country are watching,” said Shah. “You will escape by causing an uproar here but you will get the answer when you go out during polls to ask for votes.”The constitutional amendment Bill, by amending Articles 81 and 82, sought to provide that parliament would decide by law when delimitation is to be conducted and which census is to be used.This is as opposed to the current mandate, under which the delimitation of seats in the Lok Sabha is required to be undertaken after every census and be based on the latest census.Crucially the Bill also sought to remove the freeze imposed in 1976 wherein the total number of seats for each state in the Lok Sabha, and in the state assemblies, is to be based on 1971 census figures.The proposed Bills instead provided for the 2011 census to be used by referring to the “latest published census”.The use of the 2011 census raised concerns particularly from the southern states, whose population growth rates have declined faster since 1971 due to their use of effective population control measures, as against the northern states, where growth has been less tempered.The constitution amendment Bill further provided that each state would have seats in proportion to its population, implying that all Lok Sabha constituencies across states would have approximately the same population.Further, section 8 of the Delimitation Bill required the Delimitation Commission to allocate seats to the states “on the basis of the latest census figures”. At the same time, Article 81(2)(a) of the Constitution provides that the ratio of population to seats must be the same for all states across the country.Shah accused the opposition of “opposing anything that Prime Minister Modi does” and said that the opposition thinks that women’s reservation must be stopped because more women vote for Modi.“The opposition is stepping back from the unanimous decision taken by this parliament in 2023,” he said.He concluded his speech by saying that the “women of this country will not forgive you”, setting the stage for the division of votes in which the constitution amendment was defeated.Union parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju subsequently requested Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla to not proceed with the other two Bills.Opposition hails victory in Lok SabhaOpposition MPs had on Thursday opposed the Bills and said that in the guise of pursuing reservation for women, the government was redrawing constituencies to suit its own political ends.Following its victory in the Lok Sabha on Friday, the opposition hailed its unity and said that it had defeated the Modi government’s unconstitutional tricks.“The amendment Bill has fallen. They used an unconstitutional trick in the name of women to break the Constitution. India has seen it. INDIA has stopped it,” said leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi in a statement.While the Bills were brought in the midst of the ongoing assembly elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, members of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam appeared in the House in large numbers to defeat the amendment.In a statement, Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin thanked Gandhi for “voicing concerns against delimitation” and also expressed thanks to all other opposition leaders.“They tried to divide us as North and South, to weaken and defeat us, and to redraw India’s political map for their own gain. But INDIA stood together and defeated their design. This is only the beginning,” he said.“The Constitutional 131st Amendment Bill 2026 has been rejected by INDIA. The attempt to expand the Lok Sabha to 850 seats and push delimitation based on the 2011 Census raised serious concerns about fairness and balance,” said TMC MP and party general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.“The NDA government is clearly on borrowed time and the illusion of control is beginning to crumble in plain sight!”