SP Accuses Government of Using Women's Bill to Block Caste Census

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav has accused the central government of fast-tracking the Women's Reservation Bill to circumvent a caste-based census, alleging the move is engineered to manipulate constituency boundaries ahead of the 2029 general election. The Bill, which reserves one-third of seats in Parliament and state assemblies for women, links implementation to a delimitation exercise that requires a fresh Census. Yadav's charge is that the government intends to conduct delimitation using Census data that excludes caste enumeration, effectively locking in boundaries before any caste count can inform political representation. The political mechanism at stake is straightforward: delimitation redraws constituencies, and whichever demographic data underpins that exercise shapes which communities gain or lose electoral weight. For OBC-heavy states like Uttar Pradesh, where the SP draws its core support, a delimitation without caste data could entrench existing seat distributions that underrepresent numerically significant but politically inconvenient groups. The next move to watch is whether opposition parties unite around demanding a caste census before any delimitation proceeds, and how the government frames the Census timeline.