UPA’s second thoughts

Neerja Chowdhury
First Published : 16 Mar 2010 11:37:00 PM IST
Last Updated : 16 Mar 2010 12:30:28 AM IST

It is extraordinary that after a bill has been discussed threadbare by a joint committee of Parliament, and given approval by the Cabinet, and then passed by the Rajya Sabha, the Union law minister should tie himself in knots and question the very principles underlining the legislation moved by his government. Veerappa Moily declared that reservations for women are not the ideal solution. He also said to a TV channel that Parliament is supreme (in the context of the question whether the bill can be amended in the Lok Sabha). At the same time he also said that the bill would not be changed, compounding the confusion that already exists.

It was only after Pranab Mukherjee announced that the government would not bring the bill in the Lok Sabha till ‘consultations’ have been held with the bill’s opponents, mainly the three Yadavs — Mulayam, Lalu and Sharad — that an unruly Lok Sabha returned to normalcy.

The Union finance minister was obviously buying peace — and numbers — to get the finance bill passed. The government is vulnerable without the support of the Samajwadi Party, RJD, the uncertainty about the BSP’s intent given its opposition to the women’s bill, and the BJP and Left parties threatening to move cut motions.

Nobody can quarrel with Moily’s formulation that reservations are not an ideal solution. The Dalits should have got their due, the OBCs should not have needed a quota in jobs and institutions of higher learning and women’s representation in Parliament and state legislatures should have been more than a measly 10 per cent after 60 years. All this should have happened in the normal course. But it did not.

All through the last century, women resisted taking the reservation route. They did not raise the matter in 1917, when Sarojini Naidu led a women’s deputation to the then secretary of state for India E S Montagu — he had come from London to examine the possibility of Home Rule — and first asked for the right to vote. When British Parliament decided to consider vote for Indian women as a domestic subject to be settled by Indian provincial legislatures, women opposed ‘reserved seats’.

Nor did they ask for reservations when the Constitution was adopted. The first Lok Sabha had only 22 women, though many others had the requisite qualifications to enter electoral politics. Nor were they offered Cabinet positions, barring those like Rajkumar Amrit Kaur, even though Gandhi had thought it fit to appoint Sarojini Naidu as the Congress president way back in 1924 when women could hardly read or write, and women had participated in large numbers in the salt satyagraha, and Quit India Movement.

Nor did women ask for reservation at the time when the landmark Status of Women Report came to be written in 1975 — which unravelled a shocking state of inequities and exploitation against women though there were dissenting voices by Vina Mazumdar and Lotika Sarkar.

The cry for reservation was raised only when women saw how systematically they had been kept out, all other things being equal, and women politicians experienced this first hand when they got on the poll panels of their parties. Women’s representation stayed between 6-8 per cent and it was only in 2009, that it crawled up to a ‘grand’ figure of 10 per cent in the Lok Sabha. A state like Maharashtra, known for its social reforms and emphasis on girls’ education, has four per cent women’s representation in its assembly today!

As for amendments in the present bill, that Moily has hinted at, it is not as if the government did not have time to think about them. The bill has been hanging fire for 14 years; its provisions have been discussed ad nauseum. Two parliamentary committees have gone into it, the last one, headed by the Congress’ own Jayanti Natarajan, in its report submitted in December 2009, endorsed the legislation as was. The committee had the occasion to study the pros and cons of every provision of the bill as well as mull over the possibility of alternatives like giving reservation in parties, having double member constituencies, increasing the number of constituencies, or reducing the percentage of the proposed quota.

Reservation by rotation is an aspect of the bill which has come in for criticism by many on the grounds that it would be a disincentive for an MP to nurse her/his constituency, knowing that it might get reserved next time. But there is a flip side to this argument. Knowing that they have to work harder than men to be treated as equal, and to be taken seriously, many women will nurse their constituencies for those five years, if they are to be re-elected once the constituency gets de-reserved. The non-serious ones would fall by the side after one term.

This is a trend evident in the panchayats, where reservations have been on a rotational basis since 1995. Women going out of the way to nurture their constituency will put pressure on the male contenders for the seat to do likewise. Moreover, a pool of women MPs would get readied in all the seats over a period of 15 years. The entry of women will infuse new energy into politics.

As for the ‘quota within the quota’, an amendment being sought by the Yadav leaders, they would have carried greater credibility had they given more seats to their women folk in their respective parties. The OBCs today are around 32 per cent in the Lok Sabha, not an unrepresented group. But there have been only a handful of women in the OBC-led parties like the SP, RJD, JD(U), a Jaya Prada and Dimple Yadav in the SP, a lone Bhagwati Devi or Kanti Singh in RJD or Rabri Devi who was brought in when Lalu Prasad had to step down because of the fodder scam. The JD(U) can boast of even fewer women.

It goes without saying that if an OBC male can win from a constituency because of a combination of caste and other alliances at the ground level, the party should be able to get an OBC woman elected for the same reason, if that constituency becomes reserved. There is little chance of a parkati urban woman from Delhi or Mumbai winning from Mainpuri or Madhepura. In fact, without reservation for women, there is greater chance of only wealthy women coming into politics on the sheer strength of money.

The pros and cons of the various provisions in the bill should have been debated by now. The flip-flop signals by the ruling UPA ministers, like Moily’s remarks, only compound the confusion on the fate of the legislation and creates an impression that the government’s right hand does not know what its left hand is doing, particularly after Sonia Gandhi’s insistence that the government press ahead with the promise made to women of India. Worse, the government comes across as an entity which acts first and thinks later.

neerja_chowdhury@yahoo.com

About the author:

Neerja Chowdhury is political editor, The New Indian Express