The women can wait

It may be recalled that this grand gesture was made after the United Front listed it as one of its fundamental commitments in the Common Minimum Programme (CMP). This is where the humbug comes in. On numerous public occasions Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers, and party spokespersons have voiced their support for the Bill to buttress their own progressive credentials.

Take H.D. Deve Gowda’s performance. As Prime Minister he declared on July 8, 1996, that “no political party can survive by opposing justice for women”. On February 18 this year, he called the Bill a “revolutionary step”, while addressing world parliamentarians. On Women’s Day, everyone’s favourite moment to air his or her gender concerns, Gowda assured everyone that the House would take a decision on it in the current session. That session never came. The Gowda government fell and the Bill remained quietly toasting on the backburner, until Prime Minister I.K. Gujral was ready to say his piece, which he did promptly after being sworn in. On May 2, he announced that the Bill will be passed this year.

The humbug was nicely complemented by exercises in filibustering. Every procedure to delay the passage of the Bill was employed, from not being present in the House when the time came to vote for it, to recommending changes in it at strategic intervals. Barely had the Bill been introduced than it was referred to a Joint Select Committee. Chaired by CPI member of Parliament Geeta Mukherjee, this group recommended the passage of the Bill at the earliest, stating that the issue of extending reservations to OBC women can be considered at an “appropriate time”. It is important to note that the provision for OBC representation was never dismissed, yet the view that it was a Bill for upper-caste, elite women was assiduously promoted.Filibusterers often have decent manners. Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Srikanta Jena may not be noted for his floor management abilities, but he was adept at assuring women MPs, agitated over the treatment of the Bill, that “it will be passed in the next session”. And so the seasons passed, with the Winter Session giving way to the Budget Session, and the Budget Session leading to the Monsoon Session. Nothing happened, apart from regular calls for more “nation-wide debate” on the question. Small balloons to test the air were also regularly sent up, like the proposal to scale down such reservations to 10-15 per cent.

But it was the theatrics over the Bill that created the maximum stir. The idea here was to derail the Bill as efficiently as possible without appearing to disagree with it. The honours for demonstrating how this could be done should go to Uma Bharati of the BJP. Her objections to the “upper caste” nature of the Bill constituted the first grand hit. Reservations for OBCs within women’s reservations, she cried.

While she was subsequently reined in by the BJP leadership, others took up the cause. In December, Gangacharan Rajput, another MP from the party, organised a signature campaign against it. In May, a Janata Dal leader warned Prime Minister Gujral not to resurrect the issue since it could whip up an atmosphere akin to a “mini Mandal”. Not to be undone, on May 15, Muslim MPs cutting across party lines stated that proportionate representation should be given to minorities too.

But the award for the best dialogue delivery of the season should really go to Janata Dal President Sharad Yadav. His “baal kati mahila, mahila nahi hain” speech will in time come to find a place among Bollywood’s best. What, one wondered, was Yadav doing when the CMP was being drafted. Why did he hold his fire then?

Sharad Yadav’s outburst came in May. By August, when the Bill came up for discussion in the House once again, it was Mulayam Singh Yadav’s turn to take a shy at the coconut. Pronouncing that such reservations were neither fair nor just, he proposed that the Representation of People Act be amended to make it compulsory for political parties to give 10 to 15 per cent tickets to women. No prizes for guessing how such a proposal will be treated by our Parliamentarians should it come up before them, but never mind.

There are three broad observations to be made here. First, it is clear that the Bill is perceived by many male politicians as an attempt to destabilise the status quo. The repeated references to OBC representation, for instance, indicate that male politicians from backward castes, now having come to power after decades of isolation, are in no mood to let the political initiative slip from their hands, even if it is the women in their communities who could benefit.

Second, the Bill is still not viewed unequivocally as a demand from the women’s movement. Although many, including rural women, have been mobilised on the question of political representation, the issue does not as yet inspire the spontaneous support from all sections of women as the anti-alcohol movement did in Andhra Pradesh, for instance.

Finally, the cavalier fashion in which this Bill has been treated demonstrates yet again that women’s concerns continue to be perceived as secondary, even expendable. So callous and self-seeking has the polity become that Indian women should consider themselves lucky that they have a modicum of legal enfranchisement and a Constitution that recognises their equal status. It would have been difficult to voice a demand for even basic rights in the prevailing political climate.

After all, is there one male politician in the country today who would do what B.R. Ambedkar did when the Union government decided to drop the Hindu Code Bill in 1951? After resigning as the Union Minister of Law, he set down his thoughts on paper: “I will now deal with the matter that has led me finally to come to the decision that I should resign. It is the treatment which was accorded to the Hindu Code Bill. The Bill was introduced in the House on April 11, 1947. After a life of four years, it was killed and died unwept and unsung after four clauses of it were passed…”