Chopping the branch you sit on: Southern states face seat losses after LS women’s quota failure
Have you ever watched a man cheerfully chop off the branch he is sitting on and then celebrate the fall as a victory? In India’s politics, one does not need imagination. One only needs to switch on the news. What we saw here was not a man, but entire political parties, whole alliances even, engaged in a curious form of self-amputation—clapping all the while. The Congress and its companions are presently in jubilant mood, convinced they have won a great battle. In truth, they may have only written a rather elegant chapter in their own misfortune. The issue at hand was the 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill. It was not a stray piece of legislation but a companion to the 106th Amendment passed in 2023, which promised women’s reservation. That promise, however, was carefully parked in the future: after the next census, after delimitation, after bureaucratic eternity had done its slow dance. The government, in its latest attempt, tried to remove one small but crucial condition—the de...
