They all tried to fool each other and the women. The just-aborted Women's Reservation Bill had no chance ever, with its ``supporters'' paying only lip-sympathy to it and its critics opposing it vociferously. Otherwise it would have been impossible for two small parties, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) with a total of only 37 MPs, to hijack the proceedings of the House. Had the major parties - the BJP, Congress and the Left - come together, they could have overruled the SP and the RJD.The truth was that barring the Left and a smattering of individuals, 99 per cent of the rest in the 12th Lok Sabha were opposed to the Bill. They secretly wanted the two Yadavs - Mulayam and Laloo - spearheading the campaign against it to succeed.The Congress conducted a quiet, but detailed, exercise of eliciting the opinion of each one of its Lok Sabha MPs. Those engaged in the survey say that ``139 out of 141, including women'' were opposed to the Bill.The story was no different with theBJP. A delegation of 20 MPs called on Home Minister L.K. Advani two days ago and threatened to launch a signature campaign against the Bill in its present form.``The truth is,'' as a senior Congress MP summed up the situation, ``the proposed Bill threatened every member. For anybody's seat could have been a casualty in the 33-per cent quota reserved for women, which would be decided as in a lottery. No one wants to risk losing their seat. This is a male-dominated House and women will have to find a way of getting representation without threatening the men, if they want to succeed.''The opposition to the Bill took the shape of a demand that a sub-quota for OBCs be built into the 33 per cent reservation for women. The OBC factor, supposedly the brainchild of Mulayam, had a momentum all its own. Once Mulayam and Laloo had, by their demand for a quota within the quota, established that they were fighting for the OBC cause, the death of the Bill was inevitable even before it was born.No party can affordto antagonise the OBCs. There are approximately 200 OBC members in the present Lok Sabha. The BJP is supposed to have 86, the Congress around 50. Certain southern states and ones like UP and Bihar send a preponderant number of them to the Lok Sabha. Of the 40 MPs from Tamil Nadu, more than 30 belong to the backward classes.Janata Dal (JD) leader Ram Vilas Paswan says candidly what others are not prepared to express in public. ``Even if the BJP Government were to accept the principle of having a sub-quota for OBC women, I fear the Bill will not go through.''Even OBC MPs concede this privately. OBC women are not in Parliament, not because they cannot get elected, but because they have not been given tickets by their various parties. If OBC men can win in such overwhelming numbers today, and that is the logic of democracy and numbers, so can the women if given tickets.Paswan has demanded a sub-reservation for minorities ``first'', the Congress has been cautious about voicing the demand for a sub-quotafor minorities without opposing it (for electoral reasons).Following the cue from their OBC counterparts, the SC-ST parliamentary forum has further complicated the issue by resolving that there should be a 22-per cent quota built for their women in the proposed 33 per cent on grounds of ``gender''. This would be in addition to the 22-per cent seats already reserved for them in Parliament since Independence which was done on the basis of `caste'.The fact is that with the OBCs, SCs, STs which account for around 200 MPs in the Lok Sabha and 29 Muslim members, the women's Bill was a non-starter.The merits of reservation for women aside, the two Yadav chieftains have come up on top in the political savvy they exhibited. They seized the women's Bill as an opportunity to send a suitable message to their constituents back home and firm up their OBC-Muslim base in their respective states. Apprehending the dismissal of the JD government in Bihar and not discounting the possibility of his rearrest, Laloo could dowith Mulayam's help in Bihar. Mulayam can do with Laloo's support at the Centre with the two becoming a pressure group with their 37 MPs. The two have forged a tactical alliance which goes beyond their stand on the women's Bill.The Congress has been neither here nor there. Though Congress chief Sonia Gandhi had declared publicly that her party would support the Bill, the Congress subsequently shifted ground. MP after MP either opposed the Bill or called for the inclusion of the OBC factor at the meeting of party MPs called by Sonia on Tuesday morning. Sonia, who had only five days earlier brushed aside the reservations of some MPs with a categorical ``we will support the Bill'', was silent. Several of her advisors impressed upon her the importance of going easy on the women's legislation if the Congress had plans of tying up with Mulayam and Laloo in UP and Bihar in future elections. The Congress, they told her, should do nothing to antagonise them.Congress MPs said they had received telephone calls fromtheir constituents that the party was committing hara-kiri by allowing Mulayam and Laloo to wrest the leadership of the OBCs. It had lost UP and Bihar and would lose other states also at this rate.The BJP miscalculated in reviving the Bill which H.D. Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral had found impossible to push through. The Government failed to anticipate the rough weather it would encounter though it was Uma Bharati who had first raised the OBC bogey in the 11th Lok Sabha. The party may have hoped to curry favour with women voters by introducing the Bill, even if it did not get passed. It may have calculated that the onus of defeat would then lie at the door of the opposition.But no party wants to appear the villain before women, though nobody is really interested in earmarking one-third of the seats for them. The Prime Minister has blamed the Congress for getting second thoughts, Madana Lal Khurana has thrown the ball back into the court of the Lok Sabha Speaker. Women members will agitate in thecoming days, but those who know realise that this is only for the record. They will not go against the positions their parties have taken.
