TMC, DMK, SP Lead in Women MPs Over BJP

Why TMC, DMK and SP Send More Women to Parliament Than the BJP

Trinamool leads India's Lok Sabha with 37.9% women MPs; BJP has the largest absolute number but the lowest share among the five parties Modi named. Here is what the numbers mean for the 2027 UP fight.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's April 18, 2026 address to the nation named five parties by name — Congress, DMK, Trinamool, Samajwadi Party and his own BJP — and called four of them "anti-women" for sinking the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill a day earlier. On the single metric he was invoking — the share of a party's own MPs who are women — his BJP finishes last of the five. TMC leads with 37.9%, LJP with 40%, while the BJP sits at 12.9%, below Congress, DMK and SP. That inversion is the story: the parties Modi is branding as obstacles to women's empowerment are also the parties most willing to hand women winnable tickets, and the numbers explain why the fight is really about Uttar Pradesh, Bengal and Tamil Nadu — not about the quota.

The number Modi did not put on screen

Of the 74 women elected to the 18th Lok Sabha in 2024 — about 14% of 543 members — 11 came from the TMC, meaning 38% of the party's 29 MPs are women, according to Hindustan Times. The DMK is at 13.6% (3 of 22), the SP at 13.5% (5 of 37) and the Congress at 13.1% (13 of 99). The BJP has the largest raw count — 31 women — but that is 12.9% of its 240-strong bench, a lower share than every other party the PM attacked.

A peer-reviewed 2025 analysis in the Journal of Communication and Management confirms the same ranking: women were 9.5% of all candidates (799 of 8,360) but 13.62% of MPs in the 18th Lok Sabha, down from 14.7% in 2019, with "Trinamool Congress leads with 38% women MPs, while BJP (12%) and Congress (14%) lag, often fielding women in unwinnable seats." A 2024 Al Jazeera post-poll analysis tracked the same trend backward: in 2019, women were 13.5% of the BJP's 303 MPs and 40.9% of the Trinamool's Lok Sabha bench — the ratios have barely moved.

The gap is structural. The Tribune noted that Chirag Paswan's LJP is the outlier at 40% women MPs (two of five), followed by TMC at 37.9%, while the BJP's share is the lowest among parties with 20-plus MPs. Long before there was a quota, the Trinamool was fielding women at rates no national party has matched: the BBC found in 2019 that Mamata Banerjee's party gave 41% of its Lok Sabha tickets to women, well above any statutory target.

Why the 131st Amendment fell — and what actually went to a vote

Understanding the outrage requires understanding what the vote was about. The 2023 Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam had already cleared parliament unanimously — 454 of 456 MPs in the Lok Sabha, as the BBC reported at the time — reserving a third of Lok Sabha and state assembly seats for women. But it was locked to a census-plus-delimitation trigger the government had itself written in.

The 131st Amendment tabled on April 16, 2026 tried to break that lock by simultaneously expanding the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats and redrawing constituencies on the 2011 census. Al Jazeera reported that the bills were introduced with Modi promising "historic steps to empower women," while opposition parties warned the delimitation would "tilt the political balance in favour of Modi's Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party." The BBC's constitutional explainer captured the objection cleanly: the bill "raises the cap on the lower house of parliament to 850 seats" but the "basis for this number is unclear," in the words of Arghya Sengupta of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

The bill fell on April 17. The Marathi service of the BBC reported the vote as 298 in favour and 230 against — comfortably short of the two-thirds majority (roughly 360) a constitutional amendment requires. Modi's NDA holds 293 Lok Sabha seats; without opposition votes the bill was never going to clear.

That is the second-order point Modi's critics have seized on. Political analyst Sharad Gupta, quoted in BBC Hindi, argued the amendment "was political, and now the effort is to squeeze maximum benefit from it. There will be an address to the nation, protests on the streets — so that Bengal elections feel the impact." Journalist Adesh Rawal put it more bluntly in BBC Hindi's post-mortem: "This amendment did not pass, but it clearly shows the target is the Bengal election."

The southern veto — and the delimitation trap

The bill did not fail because of the women's clause. It failed because it fused that clause to the redrawing of India's political map. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin literally burned a copy of the bill, Al Jazeera reported, telling Tamils to fly black flags: "Let the flames of resistance spread across Tamil Nadu."

The math explains the temperature. Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Telangana had already asked to freeze seat redistribution for another 25 years. Under a pro-rata 50% expansion — the model Home Minister Amit Shah floated — southern representation stays roughly flat at 24%, per BBC Hindi. Under population-weighted delimitation from a 2011 baseline, the north gains and the south shrinks in relative terms. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said the exercise was a bid to redraw "the electoral structure of India" and asked Modi to "bring back the 2023 women's bill and enforce it today" — a challenge Modi did not accept.

The Samajwadi Party's Akhilesh Yadav, reported by Al Jazeera, narrowed his objection to whether Muslim women would be given sub-quotas within the reservation — a demand rejected in 2023 and again in 2026. Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi framed it as "delimitation through the backdoor."

The BJP's real audience: Bengal in 2026, UP in 2027

The rhetoric only makes sense in the electoral geography. West Bengal voted on April 23 and 29, 2026; Tamil Nadu on May 4. TMC-ruled Bengal is led by a woman chief minister who has made welfare-for-women the spine of her politics. The Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey in 2021 had put TMC's female support at 50%, four points higher than among men. Mamata Banerjee's counter-attack after the April 18 speech was to publish party numbers: 46% of TMC's Rajya Sabha members and 37.9% of its Lok Sabha members are women, she told reporters, according to the Tribune.

That defence did not save her. The BJP won 207 of Bengal's 294 assembly seats, Al Jazeera reported, reducing TMC to 80 legislators; Banerjee lost her own seat. The DMK lost Tamil Nadu; the Left lost Kerala to Congress. A BBC analysis after the results noted that "all three chief ministers who lost were known as welfarist leaders" — including women-focused cash transfers that had once looked electorally invincible.

But the numbers of women in the parties did not shift with the vote. The 18th Lok Sabha remains the reference bench until 2029. Which means the party with the fewest women per bench is the one that just won the most seats — and the parties Modi called anti-women are the ones sending, proportionally, the most women to Delhi.

The real audience for the April address is not Bengal, which has already voted, but Uttar Pradesh, which votes in early 2027. The SP is the BJP's primary rival there. It has 5 women among its 37 MPs — 13.5%, a hair above the BJP's 12.9% — but Akhilesh Yadav's caste-based OBC framing has proven the most durable challenge to the BJP's Hindutva coalition since 2014. By binding the SP into the "anti-women dynastic parties" charge, Modi is trying to prise women voters out of that coalition before UP campaigns begin.

The historical parallel: 2023 was a rehearsal

The template is not new. The 2023 Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam was itself passed with a trigger — census-then-delimitation — that guaranteed it could not take effect before 2029. Vijay Trivedi, quoted in BBC Hindi, argued in 2023 that "the government knew it did not have a two-thirds majority, but politics is the game of possibilities. The government wants to build the narrative that the opposition is against women." Three years on, that narrative-building has become the primary product of the exercise.

The Observer Research Foundation's baseline is worth stating plainly. ORF's parliamentary study notes women's representation in the Lok Sabha has "remained slightly below 15 percent" — a share Nepal (34%), Bangladesh (21%) and Pakistan (20%) all clear. India, in other words, is a South Asian laggard on the very metric its ruling party has now weaponised.

The primary-source ledger of that history is preserved in a Ministry of Law and Justice statement tabled by Minister Kiren Rijiju: the highest share of women ever elected to the Lok Sabha was 14.94%, and successive governments since 1996 have deferred reservation citing "the basis of the consensus among all political parties." That deferral is the load-bearing feature, not a bug. Each iteration lets the ruling party of the moment claim credit for supporting the principle while ensuring the practice never binds its ticket-distribution calculus.

Who wins, who loses

The clear winner from the April 18 framing is the BJP's messaging operation in the Hindi belt. It gets to campaign as the party of women's empowerment in states where its 12.9% Lok Sabha share is invisible to most voters, while the opposition burns oxygen defending itself against the "anti-women" tag.

The clear losers are the regional parties whose Lok Sabha benches are more female than the BJP's — the TMC most obviously, but also the DMK and SP, whose women MPs are drowned by the sheer scale of the ruling party's numbers. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge told BBC Hindi that Modi mentioned the Congress 59 times in a single 30-minute address; the official English text put the TMC at eight mentions, the SP at 11 and the DMK at seven.

The quieter loser is the 2023 law itself. Every additional round of delimitation-linked bills pushes actual implementation further past 2029. The BBC's implementation explainer noted three years ago that the census plus delimitation would take "several years" once begun; the census only launched in April 2026. On the current trajectory, the first Lok Sabha with a female third could sit only in 2034.

What to watch next

• UP assembly polls (early 2027). The real test of whether the "anti-women dynastic parties" line moves SP-leaning women voters. Watch first-time women candidate share from the BJP: if it stays near 13%, the rhetoric is uncoupled from ticket distribution.
• Census completion. Data processing is expected to run "well beyond 2029," per the BBC's delimitation briefing. Any acceleration would signal genuine intent to implement the 33% quota; any slippage confirms the quota is a campaign asset, not a governance one.
• Fresh amendment attempt. Home Minister Shah has hinted at another try. Watch whether the government detaches the women's quota from the delimitation clause — the single move that would force the opposition to vote yes and end the political utility of the fight.

The Bottom Line

The parties Modi calls anti-women — TMC, DMK, SP and Congress — each send a higher share of women to the Lok Sabha than his own BJP does; the 131st Amendment fell not because the opposition rejected the 33% quota but because Modi fused it to a north-tilted redraw of India's electoral map. The women's reservation debate has become a wedge for Uttar Pradesh 2027, not a plan for parliament's gender balance — and until a bill decouples the quota from delimitation, the actual implementation date will keep sliding past 2029.