The women activists did not support Quota till 1974. What led to the subsequent change in their stand? (2001)
Until the mid-1970s organised women rejected reserved seats as a matter of principle. Towards Equality (1974), the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, both restated that refusal and cracked it. Over the next two decades evidence, experiment and a new theory of representation turned refusal into demand.
Why they refused
- Equality, not protection: the All India Women’s Conference and allied bodies told the Constituent Assembly that women wanted equal rights, not reserved seats; Hansa Mehta, Renuka Ray and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur held that quotas implied inferiority.
- The colonial taint: reservation recalled the separate electorates through which the Raj had divided Indians.
- Faith in the franchise: universal adult suffrage (1950) was expected to deliver representation by itself.
- 1974: the committee’s majority still rejected legislative quotas, recommending only statutory women’s panchayats as a transitional device. Vina Mazumdar and Lotika Sarkar dissented, urging reservation in Parliament and state legislatures because formal equality had visibly failed.
What changed their stand
- The evidence of failure: the report showed a falling sex ratio, declining work participation and shrinking political participation. Women’s share of the Lok Sabha, under 5% in 1952, stayed below 10% until 2009; parties would not give women winnable tickets.
- A new generation: the autonomous movement after 1975 — anti-rape, anti-dowry and anti-price-rise campaigns — learnt that laws won from the outside were poorly enforced by male-dominated institutions. Activists from trade unions and rural and Dalit groups lacked the personal access to power that nationalist-era leaders had enjoyed.
- Experiments in local bodies: Karnataka reserved 25% of mandal panchayat seats for women in 1985 and Andhra Pradesh followed in 1986. The National Perspective Plan for Women (1988) recommended 30% reservation in local bodies; Rajiv Gandhi’s 64th Amendment Bill (1989) proposed it; the 73rd and 74th Amendments (1992) guaranteed one-third. Elected women’s performance answered the “proxy” charge.
- Quotas normalised: after Mandal (1990), group reservation was India’s standard instrument of inclusion; refusing it to women began to look like exception, not principle.
- A new theory: the argument moved from protection to representation — Anne Phillips‘ politics of presence and Drude Dahlerup‘s critical mass. The Beijing Platform for Action (1995) legitimised special measures for gender balance in decision-making.
The demand and its fractures
Women’s organisations across the spectrum backed the 81st Amendment Bill (1996); the Joint Parliamentary Committee under Geeta Mukherjee endorsed it. Yet the stand was never unanimous:
- OBC parties demanded a sub-quota, a caste critique echoed by Dalit feminists asking which women would benefit.
- Madhu Kishwar preferred obliging parties to field women over rotating reserved seats.
The 106th Amendment (2023) reserves one-third of Lok Sabha and assembly seats, but only after delimitation following the next census. After the 131st Amendment Bill to hasten it was negatived on 17 April 2026, implementation slips into the 2030s; the 18th Lok Sabha has 13.6% women.
Conclusion
The activists did not abandon equality; they redefined it. Twenty-five years of formal equality without presence persuaded them that equal outcomes needed structural guarantees — a shift from liberal to substantive equality that the 1974 dissent had anticipated.