Nari Shakti Bill: Parliament Prepares for Historic Gender Reset
"Freedom from patriarchal constraints"
Narendra Modi with his 'A Man Should be Man' agenda ...
Catalyst of Development and Hindutva champion now set to play "Her-Story"
Women empowerment is the process of providing women with equal rights, opportunities, and the autonomy to make life-defining decisions, ultimately fostering self-worth and independence.
Nirendra Dev
Making Room for Her Story
Without these men, the story of Indian Parliament would indeed have been different.
But Parliament’s story has also been incomplete — at the time the Women’s Reservation Bill passed in 2023, only about 14 per cent of Lok Sabha legislators were women. Achieving a critical mass of 30 per cent representation by women in Parliament is known to yield positive outcomes for women’s empowerment, as the UN has noted.
The men debated brilliantly. Now, as “His story” makes room for history in its fullest sense, it is time to find out what the other half of India has to say.
Why is women’s reservation important in India?
Women currently make up only about 14% of Lok Sabha members. Increasing representation to around 30% is considered a critical threshold for meaningful policy impact.
When will the reservation be implemented?
The government aims to implement the reservation before the 2029 general elections, subject to parliamentary approval and related processes.
History, as they say, has always been ‘His’ story. The very word — a linguistic quirk or a Freudian admission, depending on your politics — has long defined how we narrate power, debate, and democracy. In India’s Parliament, the story has been overwhelmingly male for nearly eight decades. That is about to change.
With Parliament set to meet in a special session from April 16 to discuss amendments to the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has urged all political parties to support the push to implement 33 per cent reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies before the 2029 general elections.
If the proposed amendments pass, the number of Lok Sabha seats will rise to 850, with 273 reserved for women.
The numbers of men proportionately in Parliament will go down. And rightly so. But before we turn that page, it is worth pausing — without male chauvinism, and with full awareness of what that word implies — to recall some of the giants who shaped India’s parliamentary culture through sheer force of intellect, wit, and oratory.
Nehru vs. JP: The Battle of Ideas
Jawaharlal Nehru was as comfortable at the despatch box as he was at his writing desk. A prolific author and a skilled debater, he dominated the early Lok Sabha — but he was never unchallenged. In one memorable exchange, Nehru chastised Jayaprakash Narayan for “playing hide-and-seek” between politics and social service, accusing the younger man of claiming to have given up politics while continuing to “dabble in it.”
Narayan’s reply was sharp and enduring. He argued that he did “not see why only active party and power politicians should express political opinions and no others.
Politics would then be reduced to a sordid party game with which the citizen would have no concern.” It was a defence of civil society that rings as true today as it did in the 1950s.
Syama Prasad Mookerjee: When the Constitution Was Called a ‘Scrap of Paper’
The Sangh Parivar’s towering intellectual, Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, provided some of the most electrifying opposition to Nehru’s government.
When Nehru moved the First Amendment to restrict freedom of speech — citing, in his own words, newssheets “full of vulgarity and indecency and falsehood… poisoning the mind of the younger generation” — Mookerjee struck back without flinching.
“You are treating this Constitution as a scrap of paper,” Mookerjee declared, condemning what he called “this encroachment on the liberty of the people of free India” in his stirring concluding remarks. It was parliamentary opposition at its most principled.
George Fernandes: The Fire of the Factories, Brought to Parliament
George Fernandes emerged from trade union struggle to become one of Parliament’s most formidable presences. Known for his mastery of defence, labour, and foreign policy, he called Indira Gandhi a “congenital liar” without breaking a sweat. As Defence Minister, he defended the handling of the Kargil conflict and explained the birth of the NDA coalition with the kind of conviction that came from being a true believer.
George Fernandes belonged to the proud socialist tradition of N.G. Gore, Barrister Nath Pai, and Madhu Limaye — men who believed Parliament was a weapon of the people, not a comfort zone for the powerful.
If one man embodied the institution itself, it was Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who served in Parliament for nearly 52 years, from 1957 to 2009. When he was Prime Minister, it was said that senior bureaucrats often complained he preferred the Parliament floor to his own office. The House was his home.
His exchanges with Chandrashekhar were the stuff of legend. When Vajpayee complained that “he calls me Guru but keeps disturbing my speech,” Chandrashekhar — ever the charmer — replied that he had
“to bring back Guru on the right track whenever he goes off-track.”
The House erupted in laughter, and briefly forgot its divisions.
Tharoor, Dasgupta, Jaipal Reddy and the Art of the Riposte
Shashi Tharoor has made his mark as one of Parliament’s finest English-language debaters — though his extra parliamentary tweets have sometimes caused more noise than his speeches.
His political independence has occasionally put him at odds with Congress leadership — from praising the Kerala Cabinet’s decision on Vizhinjam Port’s award to Adani Ports in 2015 to being dropped as party spokesman in October 2014 for frequently praising PM Modi.
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| Amitabh Bachchan was also member of Lok Sabha elected from Allahabad in 1984 |
Gurudas Dasgupta’s line during UPA-2 on the Anna Hazare movement —
“Sir, this country cannot have two Fathers of the Nation” — was the kind of one-liner that stays with you.
S. Jaipal Reddy, who sharpened his blade as a Janata Dal spokesman in the 1990s coalition era, once dismissed Arun Shourie thus:
“After excelling in journalism, Mr. Shourie is now trying to excel in fiction writing.”
During the 2000 Ayodhya debate, he accused Vajpayee of letting his secular mask slip: “This was no slip of the tongue — this is the slip of the mask.”
Bhartuhari Mahtab, now BJP’s MP from Cuttack, brought a quieter but no less effective approach — meticulous research, detailed arguments on coal blocks and the Lokpal Bill.
It was reportedly his detailed intervention in 2011 on the Lokpal Bill’s threat to India’s federal structure that finally pushed Mamata Banerjee to oppose it.
Others deserving of mention include the late D.P. Tripathi of NCP, Sitaram Yechury of CPI-M, Saugata Roy of Trinamool, and K.P. Unnikrishnan, who first brought Ottavio Quattrocchi’s name into the Bofors discourse on the floor of the House.
ends
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