The Hindu : Politics of disempowerment

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 30, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Politics of disempowerment

THE BHARATIYA JANATA Party is clearly getting impatient to secure its first ever majority in the Lok Sabha in the 2004 elections and knows it no longer needs to make secret of its intentions. This is the real import of the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee's remark last week that the politics of coalitions was ultimately to blame for his Government's failure to enact legislation reserving 33 per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies for women. In the process, of course, Mr. Vajpayee was being only honest in admitting, albeit tacitly, that his own allies, rather than the Opposition parties, were blocking the women's reservation Bill. With the communists, some of the regional parties and the Congress having gone public with their support for the legislation and the current arithmetic in Parliament thus being favourable, it was respect for coalition dharma — Mr. Vajpayee would have it — that stood between women and empowerment. The truth, however, is something entirely different. The BJP's dilemma in 1996 was that its present allies were all rallying behind the Opposition; whereas it would like to project to the electorate in 2004 that the allies it had assiduously cultivated during the interregnum have today become a liability for the party to unleash its fascist majoritarian agenda. Just some indication of the extent to which it has been emboldened as a direct result of the victory it tasted in the Gujarat Assembly elections on a platform of open and unabashed contempt towards the Muslim citizens of India.

As for the implicit message sought to be conveyed that — left to its own devices — the BJP was only too keen to cede political space to women for MLA and MP-ships, it would have to be examined in the background of the politics of hatred of people as people the BJP and its ideological mentor, the RSS, have been practising in the name of the majority community in this country. How compatible, one may ask, is such a politics, if not with religion, with women's empowerment which is integral to respect for human dignity and the protection of the rights of minorities? Its many pronouncements and acts of omission and commission post-Godhra and Gujarat provide the answers. The rejection (on false grounds) by local courts in Gujarat of the two cases registered among hundreds of instances of rape in last year's bloody carnage in the State is, if anything, evidence of the continuing denial of the right to fair trial for innocent victims of atrocities under the Narendra Modi Government. Add to this the insult and humiliation heaped by the Defence Minister, George Fernandes' statement in the Lok Sabha on April 30, 2002, that "There is nothing new in the mayhem let loose in Gujarat; a pregnant woman's stomach being slit, a daughter being raped in front of a mother aren't a new thing."

As for the recently adopted amendments to the Law of Evidence by Parliament, it is relevant to bear in mind that these were part of the Law Commission's recommendations pending for a decade. But while every legislative advance is indeed welcome, it is hard to pin much hope on them when they stand very little chance of implementation by a highly politicised police and judicial administrative apparatus. Similarly, the Bill which purports to prevent domestic violence in fact accords sanction to cruelty against women insofar as it seeks to admit under the purview of the new law assaults against women only if they are committed habitually. At another level, official schemes for women's welfare have suffered a serious setback in the form of cuts in financial allocations; the Rashtriya Mahila Kosh to name but one. No less significant is the Government's failure to implement the International Labour Organisation's Convention on Home-based Work resulting in extremely arbitrary remuneration for women. Thus the road to women's empowerment appears as distant as it ever did despite the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Indian Constitution.

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