Women's reservation issue: Means to a noble end

 Reservation of seats may not be the only way to ensure that women get to play a bigger role in decision-making, but there should be little doubt that it is a vital way.

The 108th Constitution Amendment Bill wants the quota to expire after 15 years, and any extension is possible only if a review says so. Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, was opposed to any kind of reservation and had a vision of a country where caste would soon become irrelevant with reservation being admissible only as a temporary prop.
We could have got more than 33 per cent of women in our state and Union legislatures without the prop of such an act and 14 years of high drama, without waiting if the bill should pass muster following its scrutiny in Lok Sabha and approval of at lest 15 state Assemblies to be transformed into a piece of law, had the milieu been favourable, which, simply  put, means that if more and more women would have come forward to don the mantle in Indian politics, we would not have needed such a reservation at all.
It is laughable that we could tout up only 59 female MPs in the 15th Lok Sabha which accounts for barely a 10 per cent occupancy. The question is if there is a real dearth of suitable female candidates or if the likes of Indira Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Jayalalitha, Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee are an exception to the rules and canons of patriarchy that bedevil women’s path to social mobility.

As it would be quite a task to render the bill into a law without amending some of the small prints of the Bill, it is prudent to consider that the old caste formulations would work in a gender-based reservation policy. Perhaps the most contentious section of the Bill is the rotation of seats that effectively disables a representative to represent the same constituency for more then two consecutive terms and the electorate to punish or reward the representative.

Upper class women have a greater means of access to a host of entitlements including education and therefore they stand a greater chance to make it to the parliamentary stakes. One of the main provisions of the Bill, as introduced in parliament in September 1996, was not less than one-third seats have to be reserved in the Lok Sabha and Legislative Assemblies for women, and among these reserved seats, provision has to be made for reserved seats for women belonging to the SC and ST, in the same proportion as provided in the Constitution.

Women’s participation in panchayats provided opportunities to women to participate in the decision-making process and proved to be the most effective instrument in bringing about a change in their way of life in terms of economic well-being. But this cannot be cited as empirical evidence that upper class women legislators would be more partial to gender issues than to issues that pertain to their class, caste and creed.

The big divide
We had a woman as a prime minister, as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka also had female head of states. But the lot of women as evident in statistics of maternal mortality, woman trafficking or prostitution has not drastically improved in the sub-continent. India’s maternal mortality rate (MMR) stands at 450 per 1,00,000 live births which is way behind a mandated reduction to 109 by 2015. In India and China together there are some 85 million ‘missing’ women, who either died or were never born.
While the UPA government had been instrumental in ensuring that the nation have the first woman President and the first woman Lok Sabha Speaker, besides its eagerness to see the Bill through, its credentials are not suspect. The nub of the matter is that the government will have to act more substantially.

It is not that India is unique in initiating the proviso of reserving 33 per cent seats in parliament as the system of reservation for women in politics already exists in Russia, France, Germany, the Philippines, Korea, etc. The Scandinavian countries — Denmark, Norway and Sweden — have a higher percentage of women in politics.
The basic point is that we cannot think in terms of social justice without taking recourse to reservation. It is a short cut to holding aloft the ‘disadvantaged’ section, be they women, the SCs, STs and the OBCs. The long haul to improve the lot of a weaker section takes firm and sustained government initiative, more resources, and well-laid-out policies that must transcend the tenures of governments.

Equal rights for women remain enshrined in Articles 14, 15, 23, 29, 30, 42, 45 notably, but women in India continue to remain oppressed and struggle over everything from survival to resources. Despite the glut of constitutional provisions already in place, the same feudal mindset stalks India removal of which as a matter of public policy is more important than acts of tokenism. Reservation, in effect, is not a tool of empowerment but an official sanction for social discrimination.