Permanent reservations

The women will never get the ayes, it seems. The naysayers will always shout their well-wishers down and occupy strategic territory in the well of the House. So let us please put an end to this periodic charade. Instead of deferring the Women’s Reservation Bill “for the time being”, let our political parties for once construct a consensus and declare the proposed legislation dead on arrival. Let us, if only for the sake of propriety, ensure that we won’t have to endure ever again Tuesday’s depressing spectacle, or those hollow professions about giving women their share of seats in Parliament and state legislatures. Let us, in other words, junk the hypocrisy and acknowledge the patriarchal sentiments that guide India’s highest law-making body.

To be sure, Lok Sabha’s hour-long flirtation with the merits and defects of the 85th Constitution Amendment Bill proceeded along expected lines. Lok Sabha members have travelled down that road before, and they did not take long in forcing yet another adjournment — after, of course, the usual obfuscatory nods to the need for sub-quotas for OBCs and the minorities, to the mystifying thesis that this is simply one big conspiracy to fill the legislatures with city-bred, English-speaking women. This rabid rhetoric has become far too familiar to startle. It is, however, the silences that were depressing. Speakers paid no attention to the actual problems in the bill. They did not, for example, dwell on the proposed rotation of constituencies that would erase a legislator’s accountability to his or her voters. They did not focus on the consequences of pitting women against women that the bill envisages, on their electoral ghettoisation.

Let’s face it. Self-professed proponents of the bill and its hysterical opponents are batting for the same side. If the sub-quota based argument against the legislation is a thin cover for opposition to the entry of women into legislatures in large numbers, the bill in its current form is in itself a great obstacle to its stated objective. Reserving seats for women by rotating constituencies is definitely not in consonance with parliamentary democracy. Various groups have put forth alternative solutions — like parties being forced to allocate one-third of their tickets to women. It is time these proposals were seriously considered.