Op-ed: Ruling party in India suffers setback as constitutional amendment defeated in parliament

For the first time in nearly 12 years since Narendra Modi came to power, a government-sponsored constitutional amendment was defeated in the Indian parliament. [ . . . ] The Modi government had clubbed together two bills with different levels of support from opposition parties. While all major opposition parties support reserving seats for women in legislatures, delimitation or rearranging constituency boundaries has been a contentious issue. Almost all of them oppose delimitation the way Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) allegedly plans to go about it. [ . . . ] Several opposition party leaders think the government wanted to kill two birds with one stone. Had the bill passed, the increase in seats in northern, central and western India would have won the BJP massive popularity in the Hindi heartland states. In failure, the government had the option to blame the opposition for stalling women’s reservation and use it for the ongoing state elections in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.
Read the full article here: The Diplomat