A lesson from ‘Fleabag’ on why women’s reservation Bill is not enough

The parties that have been strong proponents for the 33 per cent quota over the past week had 27 years to organically include more women in politics. Data shows that though there has been a rise in the number of women candidates in Lok Sabha elections since the late 1990s, at its highest in 2019, the figure stood at just 9 per cent of total candidates.

So, their support for the Bill feels tokenistic, like it is meant to treat a symptom, not the cause. Have they paused to reflect on why women remained underrepresented all these years? Surely, the lack of legislation cannot suffice as a reason alone.

In their book Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament, Carole Spary and Shirin M Rai conclude that the exclusion of women from politics “starts within the home with expectations of appropriate behaviour, access to public spaces, and disciplining of women through enforcing patriarchal gender norms”.

“Political parties play an important role in putting up barriers to women’s participation in parliamentary politics by reproducing gendered discourses of women’s ability to win elections, of their ability to balance family life with parliamentary work, and with their ability to perform,” they add.

Perhaps, the quota would have better served its purpose had our parliamentarians passed it in 1996, when the H D Deve Gowda government had introduced it. Now, it feels too little, too late. If women had occupied 33 per cent of the seats in Parliament a couple of decades back, the effect may have trickled down to the masses, and we would have normalised women claiming more and more spaces.

Let us not forget that the wait is still not over. The Bill may have been passed in Parliament, but it stares at a lengthy road ahead — a census and a delimitation exercise. The timeframe for this remains undefined.

My contention is not with the call for increased representation of women — that, albeit delayed, is a welcome step. It is not enough, and I acknowledge I say this with some amount of privilege, but it is simply not enough to push through the idea of women legislators in an electorate that elected only 10 per cent of the women candidates in the fray in 2019. What women need is a monumental shift in the way this country looks at them. They must not be thought of as just mothers and sisters and daughters but as women — the electors and the elected.

The day after the Bill was passed, women party workers garlanded Prime Minister Narendra Modi amid much fanfare, as he bowed and folded his hands. They were celebrating “the man” — or the “chosen one”, as he called himself. Two days ago, the Home Minister of the country, Amit Shah, asked in the Lok Sabha, “…will only women care for women, can men not speak up for them?” It was almost a watershed moment — a 58-year-old man acknowledging the ethos of the feminist movement. But, he followed it up with the declaration, “women’s welfare, women’s concerns… brothers should be a step ahead — that is the tradition of this country,” reinforcing the very patriarchal notions that seek to infantilise women.

So, forgive me if I do not join these women in hailing the prime minister. It seems as though the only empowerment that Modi wanted was his own — to empower himself as the messiah of gender rights just in time for the 2024 general elections.

In an episode of the Amazon Original show Fleabag, a character, who wins the ‘Best Woman in Business’ award, denounces it as “infantilising bollocks”. “It’s ghettoising. It’s a subsection of success. It’s the f***ing children’s table of awards,” she says. The women’s reservation Bill feels exactly like that. It treats women as a separate homogenous group, when in fact, there isn’t a “women’s issue” that isn’t symptomatic of the larger socio-economic concerns of the country.

With women relegated to a third of the seats, competing against each other, the Bill runs the risk of “ghettoising” women’s politics. The onus is upon political parties to continue fielding women candidates in general seats, cutting across caste and class.

sonal.gupta@indianexpress.com