I will no doubt be dubbed a traitor to my gender, but I consider the proposed bill for 33 per cent reservation for women in Parliament as ill conceived, elitist and retrograde. Feminists and women's group have made such a hue and cry about this "historic step in the march for gender equality" that to be against the bill is like opposing motherhood or cricket. If you want to be politically correct you have to toe this line. For that matter I am against quotas of any sort, the only exception being in the case of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes where Indian society has to recompense for the centuries of subjugation, injustice and deprivation towards the Dalits. Once you open the Pandora's box and offer special status to everyone who is not adequately represented in the power structure, there are any number of justified claimants, whether Muslims, the handicapped, the poor and so on. And do quotas really benefit the deserving? Laloo Yadav and Sharad Yadav have a point when they demand a quota within the women's quota for depressed castes.
Otherwise the creamy layer of the female species will hog most of the parliamentary seats. In a recent article in ‘Outlook’ magazine Anjali Puri has checked out the background of the 58 women elected to the new Lok Sabha and come up with some telling statistics. She discovered that 37 of the 58 women MPs – that is over two thirds – are relatives of male politicians, of the 29 new entrants at least 17 are proxy candidates for powerful male figures. Self made women are a rarity. The paternalistic approach of relying on the good sense of the men for women to get their due is flawed.
Most movements for women's emancipation have come about thanks to years of struggle by the women themselves. When the decisions regarding empowering women has to be made by men they will naturally opt for the token representative rather than the most deserving candidate, who would be viewed as a threat to them. (Mamata, Mayawati and Jayalalithaa, for instance, could never be described as token representatives, nor are they likely to win a popularity contest among their male colleagues.) One has only to recall the manner in which Pratibha Patil was chosen for the President's post to appreciate this point. Patil's appointment was heralded as one more victory for womanhood, when she was actually selected simply because the Left and the Congress could not agree on other more suitable male candidates, such as Pranab Mukherjee, and was in a hurry to finalize the name.
Similarly in Vajpayee's regime, Chokila Aiyer was appointed as the first women foreign secretary in the name of gender empowerment even though she was the bottom of her batch and had held only one ambassadorial posting. The real purpose of her appointment was to keep out the best qualified male candidate who could not have been bullied by the PM's Principal Secretary, Brajesh Mishra. There are many better ways to empower the weaker sex rather than the drastic legislation proposed under the Women’s Reservation Bill. The bill as it has been framed proposes a system whereby 180 male MPs automatically stand to lose their seats in Parliament. And since the draft bill calls for the constituencies reserved for women to be rotated, it would mean that a male MP cannot represent the same constituency for more than two consecutive terms. This strikes at the heart of parliamentary democracy where voters can reward or punish their representatives on the basis of the work done for the constituents. And most male MPs question why they should sacrifice for the benefit of women who could well be more advantaged then them socially, educationally and financially-- "the urban par-katis" as Sharad Yadav once referred to them.
If the bill comes into effect non Dalit male MPs would be restricted to contesting only 50 per cent of seats in parliament. Other proposals on how to bring about reservation, such as double representation in some constituencies are equally half baked. The bill will mean in effect that we have introduced a zananna mardanna system in Parliamentary elections as women will no longer be fielded from non reserved constituencies. And women's representation in Parliament would be permanently capped at this percentage. For the last 13 years political parties have been talking about the bill, but it has never actually been put to vote. The process begins with a bang and ends in a whimper. This is because there is a divide between publicly stated positions of some parties and the actual views of their members. If the intentions of the political parties were genuine they should have begun reform on the home front first and offered more seats for women to contest parliamentary elections. But in the last election the BJP and Congress nominated women for only about 10 per cent of the total number of seats. The CPI(M) and CPI had a worse record of around 7 per cent.
Since the three major parties, Congress, BJP and CPI(M), claim to support the bill, there is nothing really to stop the government from getting it passed by Parliament. My hunch is that eventually for the sake of "consensus" the process will be deferred by referring the bill to a standing committee of Parliament. A delaying tactic we have witnessed in the past.
- Surya Kanta Jena -
soorajkiran1@gmail.com
