Centre’s proposal for women’s quota follows UPA blueprint for OBC reservation in higher education

The Centre is proposing a 50% expansion in the size of the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies to accommodate 33% reservation for women ahead of the 2029 general election. The math is such that incumbent lawmakers will be assured that their pathway to seeking re-election will not be narrowed due to a new social accommodation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said during a campaign meeting in Kerala that assured representation for women would be achieved by creating additional seats. The government plans to increase the size of the Lok Sabha from 543 to 816 (a 50% increase in seats). There will be 273 additional seats, and 273, which is 33% of 816, will be reserved for women. The same math will apply at the State level too. For instance, Kerala will have its Lok Sabha seats increased from 20 to 30 with 10 seats reserved for women, Uttar Pradesh from 80 to 120, with 40 for women. The existing Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe reservation of 15% and 7% each will have one-third of them reserved for women of respective groups.

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Enlarging the size of the pie before carving out a new social accommodation is not unprecedented. It was exactly in this manner that the UPA-I government implemented reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBC) in higher education in 2005-06 and it was a formula designed by then Education Minister Arjun Singh.

Singh championed the expansion of reservation in higher education through the 93rd Constitutional Amendment Act and the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006, that mandated a 27% reservation for OBCs in central higher educational institutions (such as IITs, IIMs, and Central universities). To accommodate this, the government implemented a 54% expansion of seats over a three-year period, starting from the 2008-09 academic session, ensuring the number of seats available for the general category did not decline.

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Until then, the SC and ST reservations added up to 22.5% of the seats, and the rest were general category seats. The proposal was to accommodate OBC reservation without impacting the absolute number of general seats. The math in that situation meant that the total capacity of Central higher education institutions had to expand by 54% for the general category numbers to remain the same. In the pre-OBC reservation era, general category had 78 seats out of each 100 – which remained the same when the total grew to 154, of which 49.5% was reserved. In other words, what was 78% of 100 earlier, became 50.5% of 154. This avoided any decline in the number of seats for general category students while accommodating the OBC students by expanding the pie. Singh defended the reservation policy as a win-win for all stakeholders, as investment in higher education expanded massively, with several new IITs, IIMs and AIIMS coming up, and the intake of students increasing by 54% for the bulging youth population of the country.

The BJP formula of linking additional seats in the Lok Sabha for women’s reservation takes a leaf out of the Arjun Singh playbook for higher education expansion and quota expansion going hand in hand. Expansion in seats in higher education was long overdue then as it is for the legislatures now. The current Lok Sabha size was determined on the basis of the 1971 population. Accommodation for OBCs was overdue then, and women reservation has been long overdue as of now. In both instances, the strategy is to do it in manner in which a political constituency is accommodated without triggering severe resistance from other groups. The BJP had a playbook already available from the past – expand the pie before slicing it further.