By Nagesh Bhushan
Reserved for whom?
India's women's-quota bill is a genuine step forward. But for the country's largest social group, it may make things worse.
In September 2023 India's parliament passed the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam — the 106th Constitutional Amendment — reserving one-third of all seats in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies for women. The law was widely celebrated. It was also designed with a deliberate brake: reservations would not take effect until after a new census and a fresh delimitation of constituencies, meaning 2029 at the earliest. Now the central government is reportedly considering removing that brake and implementing the quotas immediately. The cheering, at least from one large constituency, has stopped.
Other Backward Classes (OBCs) — a heterogeneous agglomeration of castes accounting for roughly half of India's population and a quarter of its current parliamentary representatives — have reason to worry. Their concern is structural, not sentimental.
A geometry problem
India's reservation system is layered. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) enjoy "vertical" reservations: dedicated legislative seats guaranteed under Articles 330 and 332 of the constitution, renewed every ten years. OBCs have no such floor in legislatures. Their representation depends entirely on their ability to compete in the "General" category, alongside candidates from every other background.
The women's quota is "horizontal" — it carves one-third from every existing pool. For SC and ST communities, this simply means one-third of their protected seats go to women. For OBCs, there is no protected pool to carve from. Their women gain nothing. And the "General" pool from which OBC men currently draw their seats shrinks sharply.
By this reckoning, OBC representation in Telangana would fall from around 16% to between 12% and 14% of a larger house. Nationally, OBCs currently hold 138 Lok Sabha seats (25.4%). Analysts expect this share to decline under the new framework.
Speed as strategy
The urgency of fast-tracking the bill is itself contested. The original schedule was prudent: a fresh census would establish who lives where, and delimitation would redraw constituencies to reflect it. Only then would quotas be applied. That process, while slow, offered an opening: it might also have created political space for a long-deferred OBC vertical reservation in legislatures.
By decoupling implementation from census and delimitation, the government forecloses that possibility — at least in the near term. Its critics in OBC organisations are blunter. They note a pattern: the government moved swiftly to introduce a 10% quota for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) — which disproportionately benefits upper castes — yet has shown no comparable urgency regarding OBC legislative protections. Telangana's 42% OBC reservation bill, passed by the state assembly and awaiting central approval for inclusion in the constitution's Ninth Schedule, has sat unactioned.
The government's defenders argue that any reservation for women is better than none, and that OBC demands can be addressed separately. This argument has a flaw: constitutional opportunities are rare. The 106th Amendment is a structural change. Retrofitting an OBC sub-quota later would require its own amendment, its own political coalition, its own fight. The window is now.
What justice actually requires
The demands emerging from OBC organisations are coherent and, in constitutional terms, achievable. First, a vertical 27% reservation for OBCs in all legislatures, renewed on the same ten-year cycle as SC/ST protections. Second, within that vertical floor, a one-third women's sub-quota specifically for OBC women. Third, mandatory sub-categorisation within the OBC umbrella, so that the most marginalised communities are not crowded out by more powerful OBC sub-groups. And fourth, a full caste census, without which any of the above is guesswork.
That last demand matters most. The government has announced a caste census, but has reportedly excluded OBC household enumeration from the first phase. Whether OBCs will be counted at all in subsequent phases — and whether the data will be published — remains what one advocate drily called "a million-dollar question."
The women's reservation law is, in principle, a historic advance: from the Manusmriti's assertion that women deserve no independence, to a constitutional guarantee of one-third legislative seats, is a long moral journey. But justice is not divisible. A reform that lifts women from dominant castes while displacing the already-thin representation of 500 million backward-class citizens is not progress. It is redistribution within the elite.
India's government has proved, repeatedly, that it can act with speed when the political will exists. The revocation of Article 370, the EWS amendment, now this — each moved swiftly through a compliant parliament. The question is not whether fast action is possible on OBC protections. The question is whether anyone in power wants it. So far, the answer appears to be no. That silence — from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, from the Congress, from regional parties with OBC bases — is itself a political fact, and OBC organisations are beginning to treat it as one.
Sources: Constitutional provisions; Telangana assembly data; Lok Sabha records. Projections based on proportional modelling at 180 seats.
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