The Hindu : Seeking a fair share

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Sunday, May 18, 2003

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Seeking a fair share

TO EXPECT that Parliament will one day smoothly adopt a legislation to reserve one-third of all seats in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies for women is to believe that men, who dominate these bodies with a more than 90 per cent majority, would willingly sign their own political death warrant.

Barring a miracle, that is not going to happen. Leaders of even those political parties which are swearing by the bill — the communist parties, the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the AIADMK, the DMK and the Telugu Desam — know that there is intense opposition to the proposed legislation inside their organisations. The main effort by these parties is limited to getting political mileage from the stance of support to the bill.

It has taken 50 years and 13 Lok Sabhas for the percentage of women members in the House to move up painfully from a mere 4.4 per cent in 1952 to 8.8 per cent now, a figure that is far below the average of around 15 per cent in countries which have elected legislatures.

Nevertheless, it is a positive sign that parties whose combined strength constitutes more than two-thirds of the total strength of Parliament do actively support women's reservation. At least on record their position is that they will issue whips to their MPs to vote in favour of the bill when the situation comes. But will it? That is the question.

Barring some exceptions, even parties supporting women's reservation have a poor record in giving women positions in the party structure. It is a pointer to the hollowness of their stand in favour of the reservation bill.

For seven years now spread over three Lok Sabhas from 1996 onwards, the charade of introducing the women's reservation bill has been played out with regularity. The Gujral Government did it when Sharad Yadav and Nitish Kumar (both now Ministers) raised a shindig, the Deve Gowda Government did it and then put the bill on the shelf, and then the Vajpayee Government swore to have it passed, and we all saw what happened on May 6 this year.

Each time the bill met the expected fate — members have torn it up, others have snatched it from the Minister introducing it; MPs have created unprecedented scenes of chaos. A couple of weeks ago a bunch of MPs from the Opposition as well as the ruling benches (but almost all erstwhile socialists) used foul language which had to be expunged even as some of them rushed into the well of the Lok Sabha to prevent even a discussion on the issue. And immediately afterwards, the Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj, announced that the bill in its present form was as dead as a dodo.

However, the positive aspect is that the issue is now firmly on the national political agenda. Political parties know that sooner or later something will have to be done.

The legislation giving women 33 per cent reservation in all panchayats and local bodies was passed as a constitutional amendment during the Narasimha Rao Government's tenure in 1992 — it was a Rajiv Gandhi initiative which had failed to make it in the Rajya Sabha during his Government's term. Since then the issue of extending this reservation for women to State Assemblies and the Lok Sabha has been on the table. For more than 10 years the experiment has succeeded at the grassroots level — despite early hiccups and accusations that the husbands often replaced the elected women in decision-making — and there is no reason whatsoever for it not to work at the level of State Assemblies and the Lok Sabha, so runs the argument in favour of direct reservation.

Today almost all parties, even those opposed to it, do agree that it would be desirable to see increased representation of women in legislatures. Besides direct reservation, there are several other proposals around, all intended to increase women's presence in legislatures. There is the Election Commission proposal (first put forward by Manushi) that it be made mandatory for political parties to select a minimum percentage of women candidates or face de-registration and de-recognition, entailing loss of symbol.

There is the view — it was expounded by V.K.Malhotra, BJP Chief Whip in the Lok Sabha — that one-third of seats in the legislatures could be declared "dual membership constituencies" to be represented by two members, one of them a woman. The argument is that men will lose nothing, women will gain. Also, in the past there have been dual member constituencies and the larger constituencies could be selected for this.

The former Prime Minister, I.K. Gujral, who had moved a private member's bill on the issue way back in 1995, has another idea. After elections, political parties should be allowed to nominate women MPs equal to a pre-determined percentage of their elected strength in the Lok Sabha or the Assembly. If a party wins 100 seats, it should be able to nominate 20 or 30 per cent women MPs, in addition. Thus the strength of the House will go up by 20 or 30 per cent and with roughly 10 per cent women MPs coming through in the normal process the total strength of women could be 30 to 40 per cent. "Several countries have followed this model successfully, and this would allow parties to nominate women from the Backward Castes, the Scheduled Castes, the minorities and so on, thus meeting all sorts of objections to women's reservation," he says.

Which is the best approach? Ever since the women's reservation bill has been around a number of irrelevant issues have been raised by those opposed to it. At one time there was the demand that 23 per cent of the 33 per cent quota should be earmarked for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe women when the fact was that the bill had already provided for 33 per cent reservation for these women from the existing SC-ST reserved quota. The SC-ST male MPs were not willing to share their quota with their women just as in the general category the men were fearful of losing their own constituencies to women.

Another red herring was the backward caste issue. It was first raised by not only the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, some in the Samata Party and the Janata Dal (United) but also by BJP MPs like Uma Bharati. The specious argument put forward was that backward caste women must have a quota within the overall women's quota of 33 per cent. The fact, however, is that without the backward caste quota the numbers of backward caste MPs has been growing even as their political clout has.

The Mandal era in politics which blossomed under the V.P. Singh Government saw a resurgence in political parties representing and celebrating the backward classes as they rebelled against and fought to liberate themselves from oppression by the upper castes. The trend had started much earlier in the southern States and in 1989 it caught the imagination of several northern States. The result was that representation of backward castes in the Lok Sabha surged from 11.8 per cent in 1952 to 22.4 per cent in 1989 where it has remained, hovering between 22 and 23 per cent (backward class statistics from the Centre for Study of Developing Societies).

A real flaw in the reservation bill is the suggested "rotation" of women's constituencies every five years. This would mean that 33 per cent women MPs and 33 per cent men MPs cannot hope to get nominations for their own constituencies when it is time for elections again. Would MPs then care to nurse their constituencies? And wouldn't the electors in their constituencies be the losers?

There are enough indications that the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Manohar Joshi, (whose party, the Shiv Sena, is itself firmly opposed to reservation for women) who has now taken upon himself the job of persuading all parties to arrive at a unanimous approach, is expected to push the Election Commission proposal.

The Election Commission alternative would make it mandatory for political parties to nominate 33 per cent women candidates with a State as a unit for the Lok Sabha and the district for State Assemblies. It would mean that in a State where there are 21 Lok Sabha seats, the party contesting all would have to nominate at least 7 women candidates in that State, and in State Assembly elections parties will have to have one-third women candidates in every district in which they contest. This, it is argued, will prevent parties from fielding women candidates in States or areas where they have no base and no chance to win.

To some extent, the "alternative" proposed by the Election Commission is attractive — it is less complicated, women MPs will not carry the "quota" tag, no problem of "rotation" and there is a chance that in fact women may be able to increase their representation to even 40 per cent. After all, in States where two parties are dominant, and each puts up women candidates in different constituencies, there is chance that more than one-third will win. No party can afford to calculate 33 per cent of seats contested as losing seats and nominate women in those.

However, the problem is that even on the Election Commission formula there is no agreement. Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party would like to concede a paltry 15 per cent mandatory women candidates, certainly not 33 per cent, and the Shiv Sena perhaps none at all.

And the Government, it seems, may like to settle for anything between 20 and 25 per cent. To make matters worse, the CPI(M) has stated it will support the present women's bill, not the Commission's proposal.

The question is should women take all or nothing? Why not give the alternative proposal a chance and see how it works.

Women in India have been able to break the gender bias barrier in many professions. Women have been able to open the doors to top corporate jobs, to the civil services, the police service, journalism and a whole range of other fields considered exclusive male bastions.

Women cannot, must not and will not be kept away from politics with or without direct reservation. And political parties need to understand that.

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