The quota within

The suggestion is laughable, and I can only hope it has been wrongly reported. As a matter of fact, though a constitutional Amendment Bill is to be preferred out of abundant caution, even ordinary legislation for reservation will be constitutionally permissible.

Article 15(1), which includes every kind of state action including political activity, forbids the state from discriminating on the ground of sex, but makes an exception by Clause (3) to emphasise that it shall not prevent the state from making special provisions for women.

This would authorise the state to act in a manner that brings about effective equality between men and women so as to improve thestatus of women.

Though women constitute about 50 per cent of the population, their strength in the Lok Sabha has been almost negligible right from 1952 when they numbered 14, to about 43 at present.

An International Labour Organisation study shows that "while women represent 50 per cent of the world adult population and a third of the official labour force, they perform nearly two-thirds of all working hours, receive a tenth of world income and own less than one per cent of world property."

Therefore, reservation for women is not a bounty but only an honest recognition of their contribution to social development.

The Supreme Court has upheld as constitutional a government order reserving 30 per cent of jobs for women employees. It also supports reservation in the managing committees of Co-operative Societies as well as the nomination of women to Municipal Boards.

The argument that the women’s quota will be monopolised by urban women is a red herring. There are about 200 OBCs in the Lok Sabha. It isa stark reality that it is not their public service, but merely the caste configuration that has preferred them. Similar results will follow even after reservation for women.

The only difference will be a big chink in the male bastion. That is the real reason for opposition by male MPs.

In my view, provision of a sub-quota for OBC women runs the risk of being held as unconstitutional. Reservation of seats is guaranteed only for SC/STs in Article 330. The framers of the Constitution did not intend further fragmentation of the legislatures on caste lines.

But reservation for women as a group, who have suffered similar and sometimes even worse injustices and deprivations than the SC/STs, will be permissible under Article 15(3).

A sub-quota for Muslim women would violate secularism, a basic feature of the Constitution, and even an amendment would be illegal. Article 325 provides for one general electoral roll for every constituency and mandates that no person shall be ineligible for inclusion on groundsof religion.

In the Poudyal case the Supreme Court, while upholding the constitutionality of seat reservation for the Buddhist Sangha in the Sikkim legislature, has at the same time warned: "It is true that the reservation of seats of the kind and the extent brought about by the impugned provisions may not, if applied to the existing states of the Union, pass constitutional muster."

Two other judges however struck down the reservation, emphasising that it would amount to discrimination because a person would be denied the right to be included in the rolls because of religious affiliation and would for similar reasons be ineligible to contest from that seat. Thus if seats were reserved for Muslim women and even if they were to be elected by a common electoral roll it would still be discriminatory and violate Article 15(1) because it would deny a non-Muslim woman the right to contest that seat.

This would amount to destroying one of the basic tenets of our constitution as provided by Article 325, andwould be impermissible.

If sub-quotas are to be permitted then how can a similar demand from SC/ST women be resisted? The result would be the elimination of the identity of women as a group, reducing them to an appendage of caste and religion.

Reservation for women would check the muddy politics that their menfolk have brought about. It would bring social consciousness to political life. It will also help in breaking the criminal-politician nexus — the real danger to our democracy.

In my view, the introduction of the Bill will unleash a powerful agent of social change. But, I’m afraid, the strategy of women’s organisations has been faulty from the start. Holding seminars or lobbying political leaders in their offices or on television will not help. All women’s organisations, irrespective of political affiliation, should form a common platform with a single agenda. It must become a mass social movement and send out a message to all political parties, assuring them that women will withdraw their supportin the next election if they do not support the Bill now.

Such a mobilisation should be easy to manage, considering that a recent opinion poll shows that 78 per cent of the population is in favour of women’s reservations and the majority against sub-quotas. This is a welcome sign as it indicates that society is accepting women as a group in its own right, and not as an appendage of either the male community, caste or religion.

Women activists have a ready army in over a million women Panches. Women’s organisations should not allow themselves to be divided by sub-quotas. A split in the women’s ranks will only make it easier for males to retain their dominance and defeat the laudable objective of developing a women-oriented political agenda. Opponents of the Bill refuse to treat women as equals. It is this mindset that is sought to be destroyed by the Bill, which selfish politicians are resisting while pretending to fight for social justice.

Crimes against urban women are no less heinous than thoseagainst rural women. Women as a class cannot be bifurcated in the matter of injustice. The creation of artificial sub-quotas within this suppressed section is a conspiracy of male chauvinism to perpetuate its dominance.

The writer is a former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court