Having a say in policy

Women parliamentarians give more attention to women's issues, but having more representation for women may not solve the problems they face. The centres of power have shifted in an era of globalisation where multinational corporations often dictate at will to elected governments, says RAMA LAKSHMI.

THE energy and mobilisation powers displayed by the women's organisations across the country over the Womens Reservation Bill is unparalleled in the history of post-independent feminist history in India. Never before has any Bill been so controversial and hotly debated. And never before have Indian feminists lobbied and mobilised so strategically.

If only our women are there in the right numbers, we can change the lives of women, is the constant refrain one hears among the feminists in India today.

It would be interesting here to look at what goals the feminists in a "developed" country like Canada, with a parliamentary system much like our own, pursued in their fight for representation in policy making.

After the first wave of feminist movement, which obtained political rights, the second wave opened up public spheres for women, thus legitimising the political presence of women. As early as the 1960s, Canada managed to introduce the issue into public discourse. But it was felt that men were still unwilling to trust women with anything more than a tea pot.

In the 1970s, social democratic parties, like the Parti Socialiste Franaise and the Norwegian Labour Party, incorporated feminist claims by increasing representation in internal governing bodies for women.

The first mainstream, national political party to introduce affirmative action for women in Canada was the New Democratic Party, (NDP), in 1982. Today almost every political party in Canada has a similar program for women.

The affirmative action policy of the NDP strongly rules that the party must search thoroughly for women candidates. You cannot have a nomination meeting without showing proof of your search efforts. It then trains women candidates to raise funds, campaign effectively for the elections. It even contributes to the childcare expenses of women candidates during the campaign.

Another important initiative in the 1980s, was the Committee for 94. Formed by a group of professional women in Canada in 1984, the goal was to have in 10 years a 50 per cent representation for women in parliament. It was disbanded in about six to seven years. Its members felt they were nowhere near their goal and the political climate had changed in the 1990s.

They concluded that it wasn't always easy to draw a direct link between the number of women in parliament and policy progress for women.

One of the founding members of the Committee for 94 was Maude Barlowe. A staunch feminist around that time, Barlowe is known today more as a Canadian nationalist. A soft spoken but firebrand activist against the free traders of the world, she campaigns against the worldview propogated by the WTO, IMF and the World Bank that leads to "feminisation of poverty".

"Power has shifted elsewhere now," Barlowe said, explaining why she doesn't believe in banging on the doors of the parliament for women anymore. "It has been sucked away by an elite group of global capitalists who dictate to national governments on deficit reduction, budget cuts to social programmes and force governments to privatise."

Like her, a number of feminists in Canada believe that the circle of influence of elected governments is diminishing. When women finally got there (elected bodies), the cupboard was bare.

But research done by Prof. Manon Tramblay, University of Ottawa, shows that elected women still continue to play a symbolic role in parliament. She studied the proceedings of the 35th House of Commons, which had 53 women parliamentarians out of 301 in 1993. Using several indicators like voting patterns on important legislations, attitudinal support to womens issues, notices of motion, private members bill, she found that proportionately and as a group, female MPs addressed womens issues more than their male counterparts during the House debates; on an average, each female MP spoke 13.7 times on women's issues while the average male MP spoke 6 times; women also took advantage of the daily question period to intervene on womens issues more than men.

Despite such studies, much of the fire and energy has disappeared on this issue today. Canadian parliamentary system, like India's, doesn't allow much freedom for across-the-party caucuses and alliances - something that is possible to some extent in the American system. The elected women politicians are still bound by party whips and are not able to go beyond toeing the party line.

The feminists had assumed that the goal of more women would be enough to push the women's agenda. They forgot that once elected to power, political partisanship often overtakes independent feminism. The problem is not just to get there. It's what you do after you get there. While it is universally accepted that there is a negligible presence of women in the representational forums of democratic politics, this exclusion from the corridors of power, cannot be fixed merely in a numerical context.

Much of the debate about women's electoral representation in India and elsewhere continues to view it as a problem of entry- level access. The shrill campaign in the last five years in India has been all about reservation through constitutional amendment or party level reservation.

The writer, a journalist with The Washington Post's New Delhi bureau, was in Canada on an Indo-Shastri Media Fellowship program.

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