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Journalism of Courage
Political hypocrisy touched a new low on the women’s reservation Bill. For all their lip sympathy to the cause,and promises made in most of the manifestos, it is now amply clear that no party wants reservation for women.
It is an open secret that behind the statement of Lok Sabha Speaker Balayogi that a consensus should be evolved before the Bill could be introduced, which stopped Minister Thambi Durai mid-sentence, lay 24 hours of a rare cooperation between leaders of all parties somehow to stop the Bill. Instead of leading her party, Sonia Gandhi found herself being led by Congress leaders.
That upper caste, upper class, urban, short haired, lipsticated women will hog the entire quota is the most spurious of the arguments advanced. It is only common sense that parties would field OBC women candidates in constituencies which have a preponderance of backward classes to try and cobble together a winning caste combination.
Today there are around 200 OBC MPs in the Lok Sabha. The growing representationof these castes is the logical outcome of their dominant numbers and growing politicisation, which took place in the south first and more recently in the north. Women of these communities will win for the same reasons that the men have made it. They do not need a sub-quota. They are nowhere in the picture today because they are denied tickets.
The other argument against the Bill is that daughters, wives and sisters of male politicians will corner the quota. So what, if this does happen to begin with? There has never been such an outcry when male relatives were given tickets and this has been going on for fifty years. We have had Indira Gandhi and sons, Lal Bahadur Shastri and sons, Charan Singh and son, Narasimha Rao and sons, and the sons of Balram Jakhar, Buta Singh, Parkash Singh Badal, Bhajan Lal, Sukh Ram, Biju Patnaik. The list is only illustrative.
Change it, yes. But do not make change of the political malaise a precondition for giving a fair representation to women which is their due.Wayscould surely be found, if necessary, to ensure that the benefit of reservation is a one-time advantage to women and not something that percolates to the next generation.
The male bonding, which has been clearly visible in Parliament all of last week, has been brought about not so much by the male MPs’ bias against women as by a fear that anybody’s seat can be guillotined by the women’s quota.
Had that not been the case, this very Parliament would not have passed 30 percent reservation for women in panchayats and municipalities in 1992. The women’s angle did not even come up for discussion.
The truth is that women do not have the clout necessary for parties to swallow what to them is a bitter pill. They are not a vote bank like the OBCs, SC-STs or the minorities. Women have hardly ever voted for a `women’s issue’ anywhere in the world, though they have voted together on an issue like prohibition in Andhra Pradesh or Haryana or the Ram temple in UP. Mulayam Singh Yadav faced problems with womenfolk in hisfamily, if newspapers of that period are to be believed.
Though all women face subordination because of gender, differences of caste, class and religion make it difficult to bring them together on one platform, just as it is difficult to organise the Hindus as an entity beyond a point.
Since Sarojini Naidu first led a delegation of women in 1917 to call on the Secretary of State for India to demand voting rights for women on a par with men,women rejected the option of reservation. This remained their stand when the country’s constitution was framed and again when the important Report on the Status of Women in India was written in 1975.
There is little doubt that reservation is an imperfect solution.Most women would like to make it on their steam.Women have come around to reservation only reluctantly. They were left with no other option.
Women make up 50 percent of the country’s population. They have made forays into virtually every male bastion,including space and the corporate world. But theiraverage representation in the Lok Sabha has been a paltry 6 percent and in the state assemblies only 4 percent. India ranked third in 1937 in terms of the number of women elected to the various legislatures. Today it is trailing in the 65th position.
It is now clear that the present Bill will not go through, given the way the issue has been complicated by the demands for subquotas for OBCs, SC-STs and minorities. The impasse calls for a total rethink on all the possible options the possibility of a consensus on a reduced quota, say 15 or 20 percent, which has been advocated by the likes of Mulayam Singh Yadav privately; change in the Representation of People Act,which makes it incumbent on recognised parties to allocate 33 percent seats to women or else face derecognition; or the addition of 180 seats to the present Lok Sabha which could only be possible when the delimitation of constituencies takes place in the year 2000, though Parliament could pass a resolution now making such a promise.
In the finalanalysis, women will have to demonstrate that they can make a difference in elections, if they are to make the parties sit up and take notice. This will call for a massive mobilisation and education of women and men.
