ON 18 APRIL, news of a televised address to the country by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, triggered widespread anxiety. The severe economic distress and fuel shortages prevailing due to the US-Israeli conflict with Iran would likely leave a lasting impact and require the same level of preparedness as the Covid-19 pandemic, Modi had remarked weeks earlier in the Indian parliament. He would later call on Indians to cut down on overseas travel and purchasing gold in order to address the crisis, facing scrutiny for his own air travel after making this suggestion.
However, rather than address these issues, his latest address turned out to be a lament following his government’s first legislative defeat – its failure in passing the Women’s Reservation Bill. “Yesterday, we did not have the numbers,” Modi said about the BJP’s failure to secure the two-thirds majority of votes in the Lok Sabha, or lower house, required to pass the bill, which would have entailed a constitutional amendment. “But that does not mean we lost,” he emphasized.
Commanding a supermajority in both houses is crucial for securing the passage of constitutional amendments. Proposed legislation put forward by the BJP – such as the Uniform Civil Code, which seeks to replace faith-based personal laws, and the One Nation, One Election bill, which aims to hold simultaneous national and state elections across the entire country – has raised apprehensions about the party’s agenda to reshape India’s electoral map and the country itself in line with the BJP’s vision of Hindu nationalism.
THE WOMEN’S RESERVATION BILL, first tabled in 1996 by the Communist Party of India (CPI) MP Geeta Mukherjee, was pending approval for decades until, in 2023, it was unanimously passed by both houses of parliament. But the Modi government only notified it as a law after a delay of over 30 months.