Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi’s jibe at the RSS for its ‘neglect’ of women has generated a fresh round of debates over the role of women in Indian politics. Despite belonging to the rival BJP, Varun Gandhi, Rahul’s cousin, wrote an op-ed piece in a national daily demanding the passage of the much-delayed Women’s Reservation Bill or The Constitution (108th Amendment) Bill, seeking to reserve one-third of all seats for women in the Parliament and state legislatures. He seems to have supported Sonia Gandhi, who recently wrote a letter as the Congress President to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the passage of the Bill in the Lok Sabha.
Of course, this debate on women’s reservations is nothing new. The proposal for their fixed presence in legislation has been hanging fire since 1990s, but it has been deferred from time to time for want of a political consensus. Some parties would like reservation within reservation for the most backward women. Some parties do not want any such division.
It is a great irony that while Indian women’s parliamentary strength is negligible, India has had a woman President, a woman Prime Minister, a woman Speaker, a woman leader of Opposition and a woman like Sonia Gandhi, who was the supreme leader of the ruling coalition for 10 years, even towering over the Prime Minister of the day. In the incumbent Modi cabinet, there are as many as five women cabinet ministers, including Maneka Gandhi. Moreover, we today have a remarkable situation of having a woman foreign minister and a woman defence minister.
Have the conditions of women in India improved despite these tall women leaders? Not really. If the majority Indian men remain poor in a men-dominated polity, it cannot be the case that women’s conditions will improve with more women representatives. It is really a fallacy that a man can represent men and a woman can represent women. Therefore, the real goal of any reservation bill should be to improve women’s representation overall, not merely to increase the number of women representatives.
Who are our women leaders? Almost all of them come from the middle or upper middle class, high caste and elite backgrounds. In fact, one striking aspect of the demand for reservations of women in legislation is coming essentially from those women activists who some way or the other are related to established political families or centres. What substantial benefits will an average Indian woman get by more women representatives from a narrow social base without increasing the level of female literacy, eradicating the problems of drinking water and fuel-wood (to collect which rural women spend hours every day) and enhancing the women’s wages in the countryside?
Viewed thus, more reservations for women means more seats for the already dominating political sections. Besides, the draft of the present Bill is highly undemocratic as it says that one-third of the total parliamentary seats to be reserved for women are to be selected through a lottery system. It means that at least 180 male legislators will be uprooted from their constituencies at every election.
But what is worse is that in the next election, 180 women who have replaced these male legislators will not be able to contest from the seats they are holding at that point of time because the same constituency cannot be reserved twice in succession under the Bill’s rotation system. Thus, two-thirds of our legislators will be uprooted after every election, leading to a situation where no representative will be able to nurture a constituency. In fact, no representative will care to be accountable to those who have elected him or her.
That is why I personally would favour an alternative which former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had once suggested—making it mandatory by law for every recognised political party to field women to the extent of 33 per cent of its total candidates in every election. This approach is more scientific, less divisive and would ensure that every political formation would better represent its support bases.
Also, under this approach, no political party would like to be seen as a party that promotes women of a particular background. Even if it does (which is quite possible for small regional parties dominated by particular sections of society), in the final analysis things would even out since there are other formations that would promote women of the rival sections. That would be a level-playing field.
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