With reservations

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings,” Socrates once said. Sharad Yadav seems to have taken this too literally: he first threatened to kill himself if the Women’s Reservation Bill was passed,then backtracked to say that he was misunderstood and was only invoking Socrates. The Greek philosopher consumed poison rather than flee Athens and abandon his convictions,thereby immortalising himself for later day followers such as the JD(U) chief. Yadav argues that since the legislation does not provide for a caste-based sub-quota within the reserved 33 per cent proposed,it does not “mirror society”. Neither this argument nor his classical references justify Yadav’s shrill rhetoric.

Sadly,such hysteria surrounding the Women’s Reservation Bill pending in Parliament has obscured its flawed design. By focussing only on caste-based sub-reservations,its opponents do not focus on the bill’s more evident flaw. It proposes that the one-third reserved seats be rotated to different constituencies every election cycle. This could mean that a member of Lok Sabha will have little incentive to work for that particular constituency,since its status as a reserved or general constituency would be unclear. Critics have other worries. What’s to say that a male MP whose constituency is reserved for women in one election cycle will not simply nominate his wife,sister,mother or daughter on his behalf,so that when de-reserved,it would be his to contest once again. Assorted remedies to this have been suggested in the past — for instance,two-member constituencies — but there is little evidence that adequate debate has taken place amongst policy-makers and political parties.

The other problem with the legislation is the manifest bad-faith surrounding it. Law Minister Veerappa Moily has stated that the bill tops the new government’s agenda; the Left parties and the BJP have echoed that sentiment. But neither the Congress nor the main opposition parties give one-third of their tickets to women. The point is not to use this failure on the part of political parties to nominate enough women at election-time to argue against more coercive measures to ensure greater gender balance in our legislatures. Far from it. It is instead to underline the point that no political party has shown seriousness in rectifying that imbalance either by unilateral measures (like giving more women a chance to contest on their tickets) or by debating enough the kind of legislation needed to keep this democracy’s parliamentary character.