OBC Quota Within Women's Reservation Corrects a Double Historical Injustice

India's democratic imagination has always been more generous in its promise than in its delivery. The Constitution of India guaranteed equal rights and opportunities for every citizen, regardless of caste, gender, or birth. The Congress party, as the architect of that Constitution, presumed that the twin instruments of constitutional guarantees and universal education would, in time, dissolve the deep inequities inherited from centuries of exclusion. 

Seventy-five years on, experience has delivered a sobering verdict: presumption was not enough. Special provisions are now not merely desirable but constitutionally imperative, and nowhere is this more urgently felt than in the demand for Other Backward Caste (OBC) reservation within the Women's Reservation Act.

Neither new nor untested: The local bodies precedent

Critics of the OBC quota within women's reservation speak as though the idea is radical or untried. It is neither. Both women's reservation and OBC reservation have been part of India's local self-governance architecture for over three decades. 

The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts, passed in 1992 and brought into force in 1993, mandated that at least one-third of seats in Panchayati Raj institutions and urban local bodies be reserved for women. These landmark amendments, whose intellectual origins lie in Rajiv Gandhi's abortive 64th Amendment Bill of 1989, simultaneously enabled states to extend reservations to OBC communities at the grassroots level. 

Today, over 1.45 million women serve as elected representatives in India's local bodies. A significant proportion of them are OBC women who accessed political space only because states exercised their constitutional authority to extend both gender and caste-based protections simultaneously. The architecture works. The question is why it must stop at the village gate and not reach the parliament and the state assemblies.

The courts intervened on method, not principle

When the Supreme Court struck down OBC reservations in local body elections in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh in 2021, it was widely, and wrongly, read as a repudiation of the principle of OBC reservation. 

In fact, the court's landmark judgment in Vikas Kishanrao Gawali vs. State of Maharashtra (2021) did the precise opposite: it affirmed that OBC reservation in local bodies is constitutionally valid, while insisting that it be grounded in empirical evidence rather than political convenience. 

The court laid down the now-famous 'triple test' formula: states must first constitute a dedicated commission to conduct a rigorous empirical inquiry into the nature and extent of OBC backwardness; the quantum of reservation must be proportionate to the commission's findings; and the aggregate of Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, and OBC reservations must not exceed 50% of total seats.

The court, in other words, did not ask: should OBCs be represented? It asked: can you prove, with data, that they are not? The answer, wherever states have bothered to look, has been an emphatic yes. 

Madhya Pradesh, the first state to clear the triple test, saw its OBC commission quantify the backward classes population at 48% of the state's residents and the court approved OBC reservation accordingly. Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand have followed the same evidential path. The judicial door is not locked. It requires only the key of empirical honesty.

The caste census

The triple test was designed for state-level local bodies. But its underlying logic cannot be quarantined at the panchayat level. It says that reservation must be proportionate to representation gaps demonstrated by credible data. 

If empirical under-representation justifies OBC quotas in municipality wards and villages, then the same logic, applied to data on parliamentary and assembly constituencies, would justify OBC sub-quotas within women's reservation at the national level. 

The missing ingredient is data and that is precisely what a properly conducted caste census would supply.

The Telangana caste survey, conducted by the Congress government under chief minister Revanth Reddy and released in February 2025, offers a foretaste of what nationwide data would reveal. The survey covered 96.9% of households and 3.54 crore people, with over one lakh enumerators. It found that OBC communities constitute 56.33% of Telangana's total population, SC communities account for 17.43% and ST communities 10.45%. The Other Castes, which includes Muslim non-OBC castes, make up just 15.79% of the state's people. 

It is the Other Castes in Telangana, who have historically dominated political representation, economic institutions and administrative structures. The numbers are stark: communities constituting barely one in six Telangana residents exercise influence disproportionate to its numbers across every domain of public life. This is the gap that reservation is designed to address.

A nationwide caste census, conducted with the rigour and transparency that Telangana demonstrated, would produce the empirical dataset that the Supreme court's triple test demands. This date would be applicable not just for local bodies alone, but for parliament and state assemblies. The constitutional logic is identical. The judicial precedent is already set. What is lacking is the political will of the Union government to produce the data.

The BJP's calculated obfuscation

The Women's Reservation Bill of 2023 was passed with fanfare in a special session of parliament convened ostensibly to inaugurate the new parliament building. The timing was calculated: it came months before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, when the government needed a populist narrative. But the Act carried a lethal caveat: it would not come into force until a fresh census was conducted and a delimitation exercise completed. Since delimitation was constitutionally frozen, specifically to protect the southern and smaller states from being penalised for their demographic success in population control, this effectively pushed implementation beyond 2029.

Now to surreptitiously unravel the political consensus on freezing parliamentary delimitation, the Modi government conspired to fire from the shoulders of women reservation amendment. It introduced The Narishakti Vandan Adhiniyam or the Women Reservation Amendment Bill to carry out delimitation on the basis of the 2011 census. 

The intent behind this manoeuvre appears to have been twofold. First, to slip in delimitation to benefit the states in the North, which are the political base of BJP, and also possibly open up the scope for gerrymandering before 2029 Lok Sabha elections. The mandate of 2024 Lok Sabha elections still rankles the propaganda-driven BJP, who could not secure a clear majority despite denying the opposition a level playing field in several ways.

Second, and more consequentially, it was meant to bypass the caste census. A caste census conducted before delimitation and before the Act's implementation would have produced precisely the empirical data that justifies an OBC sub-quota within the women's reservation. 

By tying implementation to a census administered on its own terms and timetable, the government sought to ensure that this data would never become the basis for an OBC sub quota that it clearly did not want. 

Owning the past, correcting the future

It was Rahul Gandhi, speaking in the Lok Sabha during the debate on the Women's Reservation Bill in September 2023, who demanded the inclusion of OBC women in the women's reservation Bill.

In 2010, the Congress had pushed through the women's reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha but had resisted demands by the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal for a 'quota within quota' for OBC women, a compromise that cost the Bill its Lok Sabha majority. 

Rahul Gandhi's position on OBC reservation now is a correction grounded in evidence. In parliament, he cited data showing that of 90 Union secretaries, the highest tier of India's bureaucracy, only three belonged to the OBC community. India's governing class, he argued, reflects the demographic composition of 10% of its people, not of the 52% that OBCs represent, as also over 25% SC and ST population. The non SC-ST women who sit in parliament and in state assemblies, under the current system with no OBC provision, will overwhelmingly continue to come from that privileged 10%. 

Women's reservation without OBC quota does not empower all Indian women, it empowers a narrow stratum of them.

The Leader of the Opposition has been unequivocal in Lok Sabha. Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge has been unequivocal in Rajya Sabha. And so has Sonia Gandhi, who has clearly written and spoken in favour of the OBC quota. Congress supports women's reservation, unconditionally and immediately. 

But it must be a genuine Bill, not a deferred promise. And it must include OBC women, whose political exclusion is compounded by both gender and caste. 

Equality as outcome, not aspiration

The Indian Constitution does not merely promise equality. It mandates the state to actively create it. Article 15(3) empowers the state to make special provisions for women. Article 15(4) empowers it to make special provisions for backward and scheduled castes. Article 16(4) enables reservation for backward classes in public employment. 

The 73rd and 74th Amendments extended these principles to elected representation at the local level. The Women's Reservation Act of 2023 extends the principle of Article 15(3) to Parliament and assemblies. The demand for OBC sub-quota is simply the application of Article 15(4) within the same framework, a logical and constitutional extension, not a deviation from it.

The founders of the Constitution , themselves overwhelmingly from privileged castes, had the wisdom to recognise that formal equality in a society structured by centuries of hierarchy was insufficient. As Rahul Gandhi recently explained in a party meeting, they were cognisant of the social inequalities of not just SC and ST community, but also the working classes, the artisans and labourers, who overwhelmingly came from backward communities, that is Shudras in caste classification.

Their hope was that constitutional guarantees and education would dismantle that hierarchy over time. Seventy-five years of evidence proves the hope was misplaced. The Mandal Commission's findings, upheld by the Supreme Court in Indira Sawhney (1992), recognised that OBCs remained systematically excluded from the state's institutions. The Telangana data, the Bihar caste survey, the triple test jurisprudence, all point in the same direction. Structural exclusion requires structural remedy. The demand for OBC quota within women's reservation is not a departure from the constitutional vision. It is its fulfilment.

Why the moment has come

Three streams are now converging. The Supreme Court's triple test jurisprudence has established that OBC reservation is valid wherever empirical under-representation is demonstrated. State-level surveys are steadily building the evidentiary base. 

 The Women's Reservation Act, whatever its current limitations, has established the constitutional mechanism for gender-based reservation at the parliamentary level. 

The logic is inexorable: if the court has approved OBC quotas in local body elections wherever states have produced empirical data, there is no constitutional basis for denying the same in parliament and assemblies once a national caste census produces equivalent data. 

The SC's own jurisprudence provides the standard; the Telangana survey provides a template; and the caste census would provide the nationwide scale.

The resistance to OBC quota within women's reservation is not constitutional. It is political. It reflects the anxiety about redistribution of power. It reflects the ruling party's calculation that a caste census would produce data so conclusive that no government could deny OBC sub-quotas in parliament. And it reflects a fundamental unwillingness to accept that India's women are not a monolith. That an OBC woman in a Telangana village and a general-caste woman in Delhi face categorically different barriers to political participation.

The caste census is the instrument that will convert this reality into actionable data, and actionable data into justiciable rights.

Justice deferred is justice denied

Rahul Gandhi has had the courage to name this injustice plainly, to acknowledge his party's own historical limitation to address it, and to commit to correcting it. 

That correction would not merely fulfil a political promise. It would honour the deepest aspiration of a Constitution that was written not for any one community, but for all of India's people, in all their diversity and in all their dignity.

Gurdeep Sappal is a Permanent Invitee to the Congress Working Committee.

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