Her seat at the table

To understand why the women's reservation bill took so long-and why its passage, even in this form, carries genuine weight-one has to begin in 1975

- BY MARGARET ALVA

When the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam was passed in 2023, I was asked repeatedly how I felt. It is a question I found difficult to answer. There are some political events that look, from a distance, like resolution—but on closer examination, reveal themselves to be another form of deferral dressed in the language of triumph. The passage of this bill belongs to that category. The legislation came with its implementation tied to the completion of a delimitation exercise that cannot begin until after a census, whose scheduling remained unannounced. The women of India received, in effect, a constitutional amendment and a bureaucratic hedge with it.

THE COMPROMISED PROMISE

To understand why this bill took so long—and why its passage, even in this form, carries genuine weight—one has to begin not in 1996, when it first entered Parliament, but in 1975, when international conversation made it intellectually inevitable.

The first UN World Conference on Women, in Mexico City, was more significant for what it set in motion than for what it immediately produced. The Declaration of Mexico was careful, its language recommendatory rather than binding. But it established something important: that women's exclusion from political life was a structural problem, not an incidental one, and that addressing it required deliberate intervention. The momentum built through Nairobi in 1985, where the Forward-Looking Strategies document spoke with greater specificity—a 30 per cent threshold, a year 2000 horizon—and culminated in Beijing in 1995, where the Platform for Action made the most direct argument: formal equality before the law was insufficient where structural exclusion remained intact. Affirmative measures were not a concession to weakness. They were a recognition of how power actually works.