Sonia and her straw men

Aditya Sinha
First Published : 13 Mar 2010 12:38:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 13 Mar 2010 01:18:37 AM IST

Though the Congress party is the 800-pound gorilla that runs the UPA, it made a mess of passing the Women’s Reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha this week, and the reason was obviously not just mismanagement. After all, the Congress party has in its ranks some wily old men and it has had the lengthiest stints of power since the Government of India Act, 1935. Political management is in the Congress genome. So if there’s mismanagement, it can only be deliberate; the Samajwadi Party’s behaviour was a replay of past hooliganism, and could the Congress not have handled Lalu Prasad’s four MPs? And if the mismanagement is something sinister, no individual in the Congress would dare sabotage a pet project of party president Sonia Gandhi; it was the men, collectively, of the Congress who let things get out of hand. Men simply don’t want to hand women a larger slice of political power.

Some of you might argue that it’s the men of a certain generation who don’t want the Women’s Reservation Bill. Yet one of the oldest men in Parliament is the prime minister himself, and Manmohan Singh does not look like he has any intention of ever again contesting a Lok Sabha seat so why should he bother about sabotaging the bill? Congress trouble-shooter Pranab Mukherjee is another old-timer who seems least concerned about how he will enter Parliament next time. On the other hand, I don’t recall seeing or hearing Congress youth icon Rahul Gandhi urge his fellow Parliamentarians onwards with what would be an historic amendment to our Constitution. Perhaps he did not need to since his mother was taking charge and whipping everyone in line. Perhaps he’s waiting for the bill to come to the Lok Sabha. You can’t argue that he is averse to political risks, given the way he forced his party to go it alone in UP in the last elections (he cashed in on his gamble quite well). Perhaps he’s just keeping his powder dry. Anyway, there appears no evidence for the generation argument.

Some claim it is only cow-belt politicians who oppose the bill. This is a lame argument as it does not hold true for the cow-belt anti-Congress chief ministers. UP chief minister Mayawati does not oppose the bill on principle but as a political tactic. Firstly, she herself is a woman. Secondly, Rahul’s good showing in the Lok Sabha poll and his continued political excursions into UP — he’s inclined to go to Azamgarh to sew up the Muslim vote, but he’s hesitating since opponents seem ready to accuse him of pandering to terrorists — means that she can’t be complacent while the Congress attempts to steal away her women voters. So to keep her core intact, she insists on a higher quota for Dalits within the women’s quota. Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has come out and not only supported the bill but also insisted on its implementation before his state’s assembly polls, which are due up next. He obviously hopes to reap great electoral gains. And like the Yadavs he too represents an Other Backward Caste. Finally, the Shiv Sena, no friend of the cow-belt, has now also come out against the bill.

In fact, on twitter you might have seen that it was mostly young, urban men who argued against political reservations for women. Male political scientists appeared on TV suggesting alternatives to the bill so as to “truly” empower women: one was for a law which would compel political parties to make 33 per cent of their electoral candidates women. Whenever I hear this, I laugh. If Mulayam Singh Yadav has to contest UP’s 403 assembly seats, he would act pragmatically; even in 2007 the BSP became the only party to get a majority in 15 years by winning 207 seats. Even at his strongest, Mulayam will see good chances in, at the most optimistic, 250 seats. He can easily field women in the remaining 150 seats that he knows are more or less unwinnable, thereby fielding women in 37.5 per cent of seats. If none of them are elected, too bad; he can say he fulfilled his legal requirement. In Parliamentary elections, he can field women in states where his party has zero chance, fulfilling the 33 per cent criterion at an all-India level. This arithmetic will stay with us for some time as we are in the Age of the Coalition (if anything, this bill can be a way for a party to actually secure a true Parliamentary majority).

Several men say that reserving political posts for women does not help because the women who get elected are merely proxies for their patriarchs. This is even more laughable. In India, entire parties are proxies for their leader; none of the MLAs or the MPs (men and women) acts independently of their feudal leadership. Is either M K Alagiri or Dayanidhi Maran less of a proxy for TN chief minister M Karunanidhi than Kanimozhi? And if you look at the women who steered the bill this week you find wives of prominent personalities: Sonia is the widow of the late Rajiv Gandhi; Leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj is the wife of Swaraj Kaushal, Socialist Party neta and former Mizoram governor; and Brinda Karat is married to Comrade Prakash. Nobody seems to think of them as cut-outs; they are all political heavyweights. If you mention Lalu’s appointment of wife Rabri as Bihar chief minister in 1997, you would have to admit that even as a proxy she was a better administrator than he. Perhaps that’s a portent: even proxies are likely to take on a life of their own, especially if they’re women.

Lastly, there was an argument pointing to the fact that reservations for women did not work in countries like Rwanda, Pakistan and Afghanistan. These are pretty much failed states where, by definition, any initiative is likely to fail, including electoral quotas for women. This argument would have been stronger had it chosen countries whose democratic evolution and economic promise were at par with India’s. As it stands, it is a straw man argument.

There’s no escaping the fact that men are going to continue to make it difficult for the Women’s Reservation Bill to go through the remaining set of hurdles, none of them insignificant. Yet Sonia Gandhi has emerged as the Indian woman’s hope, and she can potentially push it through; and though it will erode her politically in the short term, it will make her a formidable opponent in the next Lok Sabha elections. To return to the old riddle: Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit? The answer: Anywhere it wants. With this bill, the Congress may remain an 800-pound gorilla for some years to come.

editorchief@expressbuzz.com

About The Author;

Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The New Indian Express’ and is based in Chennai