‘37.9% of TMC's LS members are women’: Mamata Banerjee points her party's data to counter PM Modi's claim on women quota

PM Narendra Modi got a pointed response from CM Mamata Banerjee on sun after he took up the supply of women's reserve at the BJP's election rebound in westward Bengal and again claimed — as he did in his "address to the nation" the previous night — that the state's ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) had blocked in the Lok Sabha a bill for a 33% quota in Parliament and assemblies.CM Mamata Banerjee stressed that the women's reservation as such not up for debate — that's already been passed with cross-party support in 2023.“What we are fundamentally opposed to is the delimitation exercise [redrawing the country's electoral map] that the Modi Government was plotting to push through by using women as a shield for its vested political agenda,” Banerjee said in a post on X.She underlined that her party, the TMC, has the highest proportion of female elected representatives in both Parliament and the state legislature.“In the Lok Sabha, 37.9% of our elected members are women. In the Rajya Sabha, we have nominated 46% women members. The question of opposing women's reservation does not arise and never has,” she said.“It is deeply unfortunate that the Prime Minister chose to mislead the nation rather than address it honestly,” she further wrote.She added, “What we are fundamentally opposed to is the altering of Babasaheb Ambedkar's Constitution, the division of this nation and the usurpation of power through gerrymandering, by redrawing political contours to hand greater representation to BJP-ruled states at the expense of others. This is an assault on federal democracy. And we will not watch it happen in silence.” Gerrymandering is a term used for altering constituencies in a manner that benefits a certain party.Also read | Why can't women's quota be implemented in existing House of 543?She noted that the delimitation move — defeated because the BJP-led NDA does not have two-third majority in Parliament — came three years after the 2023 women's quota was passed.“If this government was genuinely serious about this noble cause, why did it wait nearly three years after the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill on September 28, 2023? Why rush it through when several states are in election? And why couple it with Delimitation? Trinamool Congress has stood for women for decades. We will continue to. But we will not be lectured on a subject that the ruling dispensation neither understands nor respects,” she further argued. She dared the Prime Minister that he should “have the courage to (address the nation) from the Floor of Parliament, where you are subject to scrutiny, challenge and accountability”.She called his one-way address “cowardly, hypocritical and fork-tongued”.She claimed Modi could now “feel power slipping through" his fingers: “And you are prepared to go to any extent to hold on for just a little while longer. That is all this was."What PM Modi saidEarlier, PM Modi said at Bankura, “The women of Bengal wanted 33% reservation. Modi ensured this. The women of Bengal wanted it to be implemented from 2029. Modi also made efforts for this. But TMC did not want more of Bengal's daughters to become MLAs and MPs because the daughters of Bengal were challenging their ‘Maha Jungle Raj’. Therefore, TMC, along with the Congress, conspired and prevented the law providing 33% reservation for women from being passed.” The government wanted to increase the number of LS seats to 816, from the current 543, with a new delimitation and reserve the 33% extra seats generated thus for women. The Opposition has said implementation can be done now too, on the current number of 543, by simply removing the delimitation link from the original 2023 quota law.What's the delimitation link?The 33% reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies is already law, since the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam was passed unanimously by Parliament in September 2023.It was notified in the gazette just this week, on April 16, 2026, even when a debate on its implementation timeline via an amendment bill was underway.This amendment bill failed to pass the two-third majority test in the Lok Sabha, hence never even made it to the Rajya Sabha. Related bills about delimitation and about application to UTs were never presented once the mother bill failed.Women’s quota is already Article 334A of the Constitution of India. But that law, as written, cannot be implemented yet. It is tied to a specific sequence — a fresh census must first be completed, followed by a delimitation exercise to re-allocate and redraw constituencies; and only then does the reservation come into force.Under this original timeline, implementation would not be possible before 2034 at the earliest, as the very first step, the latest census, has only just started. The census-then-delimitation-then-quota condition was not something the Opposition asked for, Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi wrote in a newspaper article this April 13.“In fact, the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge, had forcefully demanded that the reservation provision be implemented from the 2024 Lok Sabha elections itself. For reasons best known to itself, the government did not agree,” she wrote.The Congress and DMK, the ruling party of poll-bound Tamil Nadu, even sought a new or old bill to operationalise the 33% quota within the current setup of 543 seats.PM Modi did not address that demand.During the three-day special session earlier this week too, the government did not provide a constitutional argument for why reservation could not be implemented on the current 543 seats. It provided an arithmetical explanation instead. Home minister Amit Shah's argument in the Lok Sabha was that if 33% reservation were applied to, say, Tamil Nadu's existing 39 seats, only 13 seats would be reserved for women, leaving 26 open for all. If these seats were increased to 59 in total, 20 would be reserved for women and 39 would remain open. The government’s case essentially means more open seats for everyone, more reserved seats for women too.Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi, in her speech, called for “courage” for male MPs to potentially lose some of their seats if reservation were to be implemented in the current numbers.