Dear members of NDA 3.0, the women of India commiserate with you.
It’s been a terrible week and the Opposition has been up to its old-fangled tricks, intent upon stalling progress. Just like you, Indian women have waited for more than two years for the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam to be brought into force. Actually, we waited for 27 years before that for the Bill to become an Act, long before the BJP came to power. So we understand—the unprecedented loss on the floor of the Lok Sabha must have hurt.
That is until we looked up what was actually defeated. Imagine our surprise when we found that—despite some confusing messaging all around–it wasn’t Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam at all! The actual women’s reservation law, that guarantees us 33 per cent share of Parliament seats is alive and well, thank goodness, exactly where you left it in 2023. What fell on the fateful night of 17 April was the delimitation bill, the proposal to hike up Parliament’s seats to 850, based on population. The pesky Opposition keeps insisting that this move will favour the states you already win, that they didn’t vote against women, and that they’re asking you to implement women’s reservation right now, within the existing 543 seats.
But let’s not get knotted up in details. For every defeat bears the distant scent of an impending victory. Take it from the women of India: This is a golden opportunity for the BJP to demonstrate its commitment to empower their laadli behenas and betis (precious sisters and daughters)! You lead the government, and head 21 states and union territories. Not a single item of what follows requires a constitutional amendment or a special majority or cooperation from people you don’t like. And we guarantee that even the Opposition won’t be able to wrest this from you.
Also read: Opposition should read the Constitution. Not just wave it around
Cleaning up house
Let’s start in the most obvious place, folks—the call is coming from inside the house. The Modi 3.0 Council of Ministers has 72 members, of whom only seven are women and only two—Nirmala Sitharaman and Annpurna Devi—hold Cabinet ranks. We don’t doubt your commitment to nari shakti, but only about 10 per cent representation in the executive body? It’s not a good look.
Your Lok Sabha strength just hands the Opposition its talking points. Thirty one women out of 240 MPs, or 12.9 per cent seems respectable. Until you remember that your sworn enemies, the TMC, manages 37.9 per cent, the DMK 18.2 per cent, and Congress, whom you’d rather not be compared with, 13.1 per cent. In the 2024 general elections, the BJP only managed to field 69 women out of roughly 440 candidates. And the boldest—ok maybe, loudest—woman you did send to the Parliament, Kangana Ranaut, has been publicly checked so many times that “not an authorised BJP spokesperson” might as well be her official designation.
Which brings us to a rather delicate matter. The empowerment narrative loses some of its sheen when 54 BJP MPs and MLAs—the highest of any party—have cases related to crimes against women lodged against them. To be fair, we know this isn’t entirely in your control. So here’s where a to-do—or shall we say, undo?—list might come in handy.
Take Kuldeep Singh Sengar, your Unnao MLA who should top this list. Sengar raped a minor in 2017, whose father died in judicial custody. Yet the party saw fit to keep him as a sitting legislator for two full years before expelling him—and even that only after the CBI arrest and the Supreme Court made the position untenable. His conviction and sentencing to life should have been the last we saw of him. Except in December 2025, the Delhi High Court suspended his sentence and granted bail, and it fell, once again, to the Supreme Court to stay the order.
Then there are the rapists of Bilkis Bano, who was attacked during the 2002 Gujarat riots while seven members of her family, including her three-year-old daughter, were murdered. In 2022, the Gujarat government released all 11 men convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, who were garlanded upon return. The panel that recommended their freedom included two BJP MLAs and a member of the BJP Mahila Morcha. One went so far as to call the rapists “Brahmins with good sanskaar”. The Supreme Court had to send them back in 2024, so there’s no need to undo anything here. Just a reminder that the women of India were watching.
And then there is the bahubali of UP politics Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh accused of sexual harassment by India’s star athletes. This was such a sordid episode that it should have been instantly Ctrl+Z’d.
Sakshi Malik was labelled “a daughter of India” by the Prime Minister when she brought home the country’s first Olympic medal in women’s wrestling in 2016. The Haryana government made her the face of the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign. Malik, along with Vinesh Phogat, were Nari Shakti incarnate, until they sat at Jantar Mantar in January 2023, accusing your six-time MP and Wrestling Federation president of sexual harassment spanning a decade. Then they became something else entirely.
When the wrestlers marched to the new Parliament building, they were physically dragged off the street and shoved into police vans. Smriti Irani, then the Women and Child Development Minister, remained silent for a long time, only to later attack the protesters. The party’s eventual resolution was to deny Singh a ticket in 2024 and hand his Kaiserganj constituency to his son, who won comfortably. This is one way of keeping it in the family.
It’s gotten harder to defend the party’s shielding of sexual harassers and rapists, when we’ve witnessed it so often. In Kathua, where an eight-year-old from the nomadic Bakarwal community was abducted, gang-raped, and murdered, two BJP ministers attended a rally defending the accused. In Hathras, where a 19-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped and killed, and the UP police cremated her body at 3am, while her family was locked inside their own home—a BJP MLA suggested that the solution to rape is to instil better sanskaar in girls.
At some point, even you’ll have to admit that patterns become culture. And cultures, unlike a constitutional amendment, can be changed from within.
Also read: A Modi govt constitutional amendment Bill falls for the 1st time in 12 yrs. How it happened
Conditions on protection
While we’re on the subject of things that need no Opposition vote, a word about schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao. Maybe we could do with less headline management, especially since a Parliamentary Committee found that 78.91 per cent of the Rs 848 crore budget was spent on advertising between 2016 and 2019? Radical suggestion, but maybe those funds were better spent on schools or nutrition or health infrastructure, instead of hoardings?
We realise, of course, that the BJP’s concern for women extends well beyond Parliament and schemes—and into our personal lives. Five BJP-governed states now have laws on the books designed to protect us from our own romantic choices—they’re called “love jihad laws”. On paper, these are anti-conversion legislations. In practice, they are used overwhelmingly against Hindu women who choose to marry Muslim men. Because in the BJP’s imagination, a woman is a half-baked adult whose consent in such cases is only evidence of entrapment. Touching, had the NIA not investigated 89 interfaith marriages in Kerala and found zero evidence of coercion in any of them.
Yet, a woman who says yes to a man of another faith is a victim in need of rescue, but a woman who says no to her own husband is not a victim at all. When the Supreme Court was hearing petitions to criminalise marital rape, the government of India argued it would “severely impact the conjugal relationship” and could “destroy the institution of marriage.” We gather marriage might survive rape, but not the criminalisation of it.
This protectiveness has its limits. It does not extend to the internet, where your digital ecosystem ensures that women who speak out of line are swiftly reminded of their place. You know, things like Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai apps, which listed over a hundred Muslim women for a mock online auction, whose creators were heavily influenced by Hindutva ideology? Even as the Act was being discussed on the floor of the house, a young woman in Noida stood up for a Muslim couple, and is now being harassed and doxxed for her trouble.
Through all of this, at least the BJP Mahila Morcha maintains a consistent record. It protests sexual violence with intense ferocity—so long as the accused belong to any party other than the BJP. Actually, even other mahilas, who do not subscribe to their worldview, are fair targets: Young Hindu women dating Muslim men deserve slaps, couples on beaches should be chased away for “immoral activities”, and women lawyers representing murdered children must be hounded. We might suggest a redirection of all that formidable energy, but we suspect the brief doesn’t allow it.
Still, the offer stands. Everything you need to do or undo on this list is within your power. You want to be the party of Nari Shakti—we want that too. The best time to start was 12 years ago. The second best time to start is now.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)