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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Judgment reserved


We stand at the cusp of big change — the Rajya Sabha has, in a volatile and momentous session, passed the Women’s Reservation Bill. After 14 years of stop-start, when demands for sub-quotas within the category of “women” for other disadvantaged groups hobbled the bill’s progress, it has finally been set in real motion. As the drama in the Rajya Sabha demonstrated, it will not be easy. Competing demands to be more unequal than others had created political gridlock — but that, it now appears, might give way to a new kind of participation by women.

The question of women’s electoral representation has reared its head several times, and has always been accompanied by the same tensions. Separate electorate constituencies for women were introduced by the British Raj in the provincial elections of 1936-1937 and 1946, but independent India rejected the idea as an imperial restraint, and patronising to women. Now, we are coming full circle to accepting that women need to be recognised as a constituency by themselves, split as they are across community, class and caste. Women who belong to a backward caste and live in a backward region suffer cumulative layers of disadvantage. However, it’s obvious that women of all strata are under-represented in the legislatures — making the bill’s rationale self-evident. What’s more, we are all bags of selves, and choose our self-description according to context. When identity intertwines with material interests, rational calculation comes into play. So if being a woman offers greater benefits than, say, being a Muslim, you might highlight that facet of your identity. As studies of Indian women sarpanches have shown, over the years they have learnt to identify and administer as women, rather than as members of particular castes. Perhaps, if this experiment works out for the best, women might, in just over a decade, no longer need this affirmative action to hold their representation in assemblies.

However promising and ultimately worthwhile such a situation is, the traumatic passage of the bill reveals how imperfect the mechanics of it are. This will have huge and literally unsettling effects on our political system, as a big fraction of our MPs and MLAs are uprooted from their constituency every election. Can our politics be mindful of this imperfect measure and innovatively retain the parliamentary covenant between elected and constituent? Will this newly opened space be co-opted by well-connected women? Will stakeholders be able to subvert the progressive principle of gender parity and consolidate power by proxy? As this experiment unfolds over 15 years, we will discover whose interests it ends up advancing.