Opinion A travesty of women’s empowerment

Another passionate supporter of 33 per cent of Lok Sabha seats being reserved for women has been Shrimati Sonia Gandhi. She gave one of her rare interviews to declare on NDTV that she is ‘very happy’. What is it about Sonia-behn that makes her lend her name to the worst,most retrogressive measures? It is thanks to her that we spend thousands of crore rupees on NREGA,which nobody will ever get rid of because it has become such an easy and lucrative source of corruption. While wandering about rural India recently I asked a politician at what point the money starts disappearing into people’s pockets and he said,‘Right from the top and right down to the bottom. Now that there is a move to exclude sarpanches there may be some trouble.’ It was also under the benign guidance of Soniaji that we pushed through that law to distribute what remains of our forests to Adivasis.

Of all these retrogressive measures,the most useless but irreversible is the Women’s Reservation Bill. It is tokenism of the most damaging kind. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of Indian women will get nothing from it but they will be told how wonderful it is for them because they are now ‘empowered’. It will make no difference to the horrible reality that nearly all abortions in India are of girl babies. No difference to the fact that most illiterate Indians are female. No difference to the sickening truth that little girls make up nearly half the prostitutes in India and that most children who are trafficked to the brothels of Mumbai and Delhi are female. But,women will be fed this travesty of empowerment in the hope that they forget the rest.

If women politicians were all that was needed to solve the problems of Indian women,they would have been solved a long time ago. Indira Gandhi is to date the longest serving Prime Minister in independent India and her daughter-in-law will by 2014 have been de facto Prime Minister for ten years. So why are baby girls still killed in the womb? Why are they married off as children to old men? Why are they trafficked before they even understand what the word brothel means? Why are they not even safe in their own homes where sixty percent of all rapes in India occur? Will all these things change when there are 180 women sitting in reserved seats in the Lok Sabha?

No. Of course not. Or why would the lot of Dalits and Adivasis have changed so little after 60 years of reservations? Everyone knows that things only really change when there is education,healthcare and equal opportunity. If our women politicians were sincere in their concern for women these are the issues they would have been raising in Parliament.

If they have not done so it is because the real noise and fury is not about empowering the women of India so much as empowering a handful of politically ambitious women who think it will be easier now for them to get into the Lok Sabha. For this we will pay by weakening the foundations of our Parliamentary democracy. It is the one institution that distinguishes us from our neighbours. The one institution that China with all its infrastructural successes has not been able to build. What a tragedy that our political leaders are so paralysed by political correctness that not one of them has the courage to stand up in public and admit that the Women’s Reservation Bill needs to be tossed into the garbage bin.