Yogi Adityanath Slams SP, Congress on Women

Yogi Adityanath's "Anti-Women" Attack on SP, Congress: The Real Target Is 2027

Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath is branding SP and Congress "anti-women" after the 131st Amendment's defeat — the campaign is really about 70 million UP women voters ahead of 2027.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's serial attacks on the Samajwadi Party and Congress as "anti-women" — culminating in a BJP-led Jan Akrosh Padyatra through Lucknow — are not a reaction to a stalled parliamentary bill. They are the opening move of the 2027 Uttar Pradesh assembly campaign, built on a single piece of evidence: the 298–230 defeat of the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill on April 17, 2026, the first constitutional amendment to fail under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP has decided that the fastest route to holding a state of 70 million women voters is to turn that defeat into a moral indictment of the opposition — and Adityanath, not Modi, is being asked to carry that argument door to door.

What actually happened in April — and why Adityanath is still talking about it

Between April 16 and 18, 2026, the Modi government convened a special session of Parliament and moved three linked bills: the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, the Delimitation Bill and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill, together designed to expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to as many as 850 seats and to operationalise the one-third women's quota already enacted in 2023. The government's own record is unusually direct about the outcome: as the Press Information Bureau notes, "the Constitution (One Hundred and Thirty-First Amendment) Bill, 2026 could not have the required majority as per Article 368(2) of the Constitution of India on its motion for consideration," and the two dependent bills were dropped.

The vote was 298 in favour and 230 against — 62 short of the two-thirds threshold, according to the NUS Institute of South Asian Studies, which called it the first constitutional amendment blocked during Modi's tenure. The opposition's objection was not to reserving seats for women. It was to grafting that reservation onto a delimitation exercise based on the 2011 census, which southern and eastern states argue would shift Lok Sabha weight sharply northward. Rahul Gandhi called it "merely an attempt to seize power through delimitation and gerrymandering," in comments reported by Al Jazeera; Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav asked in the House whether Muslim women would be given a sub-quota, per the same report.

On April 18, Modi addressed the nation. "Nari apna apmaan kabhi nahin bhoolti," he said — women never forget an insult — telling the country the opposition would "surely be punished" for the "sin" of blocking the bill, and asking the country's mothers and sisters for forgiveness. BBC Hindi recorded the address; the government's grievance, in other words, is now policy.

The thesis behind Yogi's line

Adityanath's role in that policy is to make the argument stick where it matters most: in the state that sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha and votes in early 2027. His Lucknow press conference on April 19 invoked Draupadi's cheerharan — the disrobing episode from the Mahabharata — accusing the opposition of a "conspiracy against women," reported India TV. Ten days later, alongside Union Women and Child Development Minister Annapurna Devi, he demanded that the SP and Congress apologise for opposing the bill, per The New Indian Express. By early July 2026, the entire UP BJP machinery — cabinet ministers, MLAs, NDA allies — walked with him through Lucknow, an Indian Express dispatch describing the Jan Akrosh Padyatra as the anchor of a coordinated statewide agitation.

Adityanath's phrasing has been consistent and clinical. He told a Gorakhpur rally that "the deeds of Congress and SP have been anti-women from the beginning," a line carried by the Times of India. At a special assembly session on women's reservation, Free Press Journal reported him accusing both parties of opposing women's participation while claiming credit for their symbols. And to a Lucknow rally covered by Hindustan Times, he argued that opposition parties raise women's slogans for votes but "failed to take concrete steps when in power."

The reason the line has traction is that it is anchored to a specific, documented parliamentary vote — not to a slogan. That is what separates this from earlier BJP women's-security campaigning in UP.

The historical parallel that makes the attack land

Yogi's rhetoric has a longer memory than the current cycle. The Women's Reservation Bill was first introduced in 1996 by the H.D. Deve Gowda government; every attempt since — 1998, 1999, 2008 — collapsed in part because of resistance from the Samajwadi Party and its Bihar allies, as Al Jazeera documented in a 2021 retrospective. In 2010, when the bill passed the Rajya Sabha, SP founder Mulayam Singh Yadav told Al Jazeera, "We are not anti-women but we want reservations for women hailing from minority and backward classes first."

That history is what Adityanath is reactivating. Brookings scholars Shamika Ravi and Mudit Kapoor noted years ago that the SP and BSP had opposed the bill despite representing Uttar Pradesh, "which has historically had one of the lowest sex ratios in the country." For a BJP looking to consolidate Hindu upper-caste and non-Yadav OBC women against Akhilesh Yadav's Muslim-Yadav-Dalit coalition, resurrecting a three-decade SP paper trail is more useful than any 2026 talking point.

Who benefits, who loses

The immediate winner is Adityanath himself. His June 2026 cabinet expansion signalled to state party workers that he will lead the 2027 campaign — a reading BBC Hindi corroborated, quoting senior journalist Brajesh Shukla that the party "needs Yogi Adityanath" and that his stock rises further if the BJP wins UP again. The padyatra is his platform to convert a national grievance into local mobilisation without waiting for Delhi.

The loser is the opposition's most valuable asset in UP: the PDA (Pichhda-Dalit-Alpasankhyak) coalition that gave Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi 43 Lok Sabha seats from the state in 2024. That alliance, as BBC Hindi noted, pulled Dalit and Muslim voters together with the SP's Yadav base. A running BJP charge that the SP is "inherently anti-women" — echoed by The Hans India on Adityanath's "chameleon" jibe — is designed to peel non-Yadav OBC women and Dalit women away at the margins. In a state where turnout gaps of two or three percentage points decide seats, that is the whole ballgame.

The second-order loser is federalism. As Carnegie's post-mortem argues, the 131st Amendment package used women's reservation "as a vehicle to push through a broader reengineering of India's electoral design." By making the women's quota politically inseparable from delimitation, the government has locked one of India's most popular reforms behind its most divisive one — a design that the Takshashila Institution's analysts described as an affront to federalism in an April 28 post-mortem. Adityanath's speeches are the political product of that packaging: the BJP now gets to attack the opposition for blocking women's rights while never having to concede that delimitation was the real fight.

The unresolved arithmetic — and why the attack may not be enough

Here the analyst's caveat matters. BJP outreach to women voters in UP has been intense but the payoff has been narrower than the party's messaging suggests. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the BJP won 36% of female votes nationally versus 37% of male votes, according to the Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey reported by Al Jazeera — meaning Modi's gender-targeted schemes did not, in fact, produce a decisive female tilt toward the BJP. Congress's share of women voters rose two points; Trinamool sent a higher percentage of women to Parliament (38%) than the BJP (12.5%).

Uttar Pradesh's underlying gender numbers also cut against the BJP's story. The state records India's highest conviction rate for crimes against women, but the BBC documented in 2022 that police in UP registered nearly 50,000 crimes against women in 2020 alone, including 2,796 rapes; only 9.4% of the state's women were in the workforce even before the pandemic. Adityanath can attack the SP's record; the SP can attack his data. That is why the padyatra frames the argument as one about intent — an anti-women "history" — rather than about statistics. It is the more defensible ground.

The final variable is welfare politics. BBC Hindi's analysis of the "Ladli Behna" playbook — Madhya Pradesh's ₹1,000-a-month scheme that helped the BJP win 163 of 230 seats in 2023, and Maharashtra's ₹1,500 "Ladki Bahin" scheme — suggests the party's most reliable route to women voters is cash-transfer welfare, not moral rhetoric. If Adityanath's UP cabinet does not roll out a comparable direct-benefit scheme before early 2027, the "anti-women" narrative alone will be doing more work than the evidence warrants.

What to watch next

Three catalysts will tell you whether the Yogi line converts:

• The UP Budget window (early 2027): Watch for a Ladli Behna-style direct-benefit scheme for women. Without it, the padyatra's rhetoric is unarmed.
• The next parliamentary session: The government has said it will return with a modified 131st Amendment package. If it de-links women's reservation from delimitation, Adityanath loses his sharpest weapon; if it re-introduces the same bundle, the opposition gets a second chance to be blamed.
• The 2027 UP assembly election itself: The BJP's share of women voters, disaggregated by caste, will settle whether "SP-Congress are anti-women" was strategy or theatre. Lokniti-CSDS will publish that data within a week of results.

Diplomat View

The evidence supports a specific, falsifiable call: Yogi Adityanath's "anti-women" campaign is not primarily about the 131st Amendment or even women's representation. It is a caste-agnostic wedge designed to fracture the SP-Congress PDA coalition in Uttar Pradesh before 2027 by peeling off non-Yadav OBC and Dalit women. It will succeed if — and only if — it is paired with a cash-transfer scheme in the state budget and if the government does not re-introduce the delimitation bundle in a form that reignites the federalism row. It will fail if the opposition manages to reframe the April vote as a defence of southern and eastern states against a northern power grab, which is the framing Rahul Gandhi and M.K. Stalin are already pushing. Revise this forecast if the BJP announces a UP women's DBT scheme above ₹1,200 a month before December 2026, or if a modified women's reservation bill passes in the Monsoon or Winter Session with opposition support — either event would make the padyatra's argument redundant, and the "anti-women" line would quietly disappear from BJP scripts.