Three years after Parliament unanimously passed a landmark law reserving one-third of seats for women, Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi is demanding a straight answer: why has it still not been enforced? In a pointed post on Saturday, 8 August 2026, Gandhi addressed Union Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Kiren Rijiju directly, writing — 'Rijiju ji, sansadiya karya mantri hone ke naate aapse behtar yeh kaun jaanta hoga' ('Rijiju ji, who would know this better than you, as the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs') — and reminding him that the Women's Reservation Bill was passed unanimously in 2023 with Congress's full support. His sharper question: why, after three years, has it not been implemented, and why is the government now linking it 'unnecessarily' to delimitation?

The law that exists but does not yet operate

The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, passed by both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha in September 2023, reserves one-third of seats in Parliament and state assemblies for women. The passage was historic — cross-party, unanimous, celebrated. But the Act itself contains a critical conditionality: it comes into force only after a delimitation exercise, which in turn depends on the completion of a fresh census. No census, no delimitation. No delimitation, no reservation. That procedural chain is precisely what Gandhi is challenging. The argument from the Opposition has long been that the two processes — women's reservation and delimitation — can and should be decoupled, allowing the quota to take effect without waiting for a census that has no fixed deadline.

A decades-long struggle condensed into a clause

The road to the 2023 Act was itself a thirty-year detour. An earlier version — the 108th Constitutional Amendment Bill — cleared the Rajya Sabha in 2010 but lapsed without Lok Sabha approval, joining a line of failed attempts stretching back to the 1990s. When the Narendra Modi government revived and passed the bill in September 2023, it was widely hailed as a breakthrough. The delimitation clause, however, was flagged immediately by critics as a built-in delay mechanism. The Constitution (84th Amendment) Act, 2001 had already frozen the readjustment of Lok Sabha seat numbers until after the first census following 2026 — meaning delimitation is, at minimum, years away. Women aspirants and Opposition leaders have since argued that the reservation, as written, could effectively be deferred into the next decade.

Gandhi's direct address to Rijiju

By naming Rijiju specifically — the minister constitutionally responsible for managing the government's legislative calendar — Gandhi is framing this not as an abstract policy debate but as an accountability question. The implication is clear: the minister who shepherds bills through Parliament cannot claim ignorance of a law his own government passed and celebrated. Gandhi's post asks why the government is now 'unnecessarily' tying the law's enforcement to delimitation rather than finding a path to earlier implementation. With no government clarification on decoupling the two processes in sight, the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam sits on the books — passed, praised, and pending.