Shah Claims States' Share in Bigger Lok Sabha Won't Change, but Bills Do Not Say So; Trump Says He Could Visit Pakistan; Modi's Delimitation Agenda Revives Ambedkar, Rajaji's Fears
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Snapshot of the day
April 16, 2026
Anirudh S.K.
Today the Modi government introduced its three Bills seeking to expand the Lok Sabha, contentiously on the basis of the “latest published census” available at the time the Delimitation Commission is constituted, ostensibly to implement the 33% reservation for women in the House. Its Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill meant to effect the new quota and which proposes to prematurely remove the 50-year-old freeze on delimitation would require a two-thirds majority to clear the Lok Sabha, which the ruling NDA falls short of by 66 members. Upon the opposition’s insistence the Amendment Bill was put to a voice vote before being introduced, where 251 MPs of the 436 present (58%) said aye.
Amid consternation especially among the southern states over the fact that an expansion of the Lok Sabha based on the 2011 census, it being the last published one, would reduce their shares in the House, the government repeated the claim made via ‘sources’ in the press that all states will undergo a uniform 50% increase in seats. When it was pointed out that the Bills are entirely silent on such an arrangement, the following reply came: “They said this is not mentioned in the Bill … I, Amit Shah, home minister of India, is saying, [as] the one who piloted this Bill.” That, as some have put it on social media, is as reassuring as being told to “trust me bro” simply because the delimitation commission is meant to be an independent body, which is even immune from judicial scrutiny. How can the government then direct it or make that promise without the Bill saying so? But Prime Minister Narendra Modi – who left the House 40 minutes after he walked in – simply said “there will be no change in [the] proportion [of seats]”. Here is a fact check of all that Shah claimed in his speech.
This will be cause for concern even if the states retain their existing weightage in an 850-strong House. In such a scenario, Siddharth Varadarajan notes, “the net effect would be to add voice and space to a group of Hindi-speaking states that already have a domineering presence”. There is ironically a similar problem with regard to women’s reservation: although their share of the House would more than double to reach 33%, given that “men tend to occupy more physical and aural space … the effect of having 284 women amongst 566 men will be quite different from having 181 women amongst 362 men”.
Pavan Korada also writes that such a uniform increase would lead to the more populous states having even more people per MP: “We need a more sophisticated formula to account for increased populations, but also to protect the proportional representation of states that successfully implemented family planning.”
The opposition parties, which have vowed to vote against the Bills, said on Thursday that the Bills are a means of carrying out delimitation via the backdoor with women’s reservation as a front. They said they have little reason to trust such a delimitation based on how constituencies were redrawn in Assam, and Jammu and Kashmir. Akhilesh Yadav also said that the government is “running away from the [2027] census because the demand for caste census will rise” after that.
Beyond the headlines, it’s pretty clear that Modi is “using the women’s quota to redraw the electoral map and secure a 2029 win for the BJP”, Menaka Doshi says. Regardless, check out this graphic for a real idea of what Modi’s women empowerment agenda looks like as things stand.
Even as the Lok Sabha is debating advancing the implementation of the women’s reservation Act, the Union law ministry on Thursday night inexplicably issued a notification announcing that the legislation has come into force with immediate effect.
Meanwhile, the Safai Karmachari Andolan’s Bezwada Wilson says that with two more sewer cleaning deaths having
