It may still happen. If the Women's Reservation Bill - which was tabled in the Rajya Sabha yesterday amidst chaos and disruption - does actually get passed by both houses of Parliament, it will bring to closure an issue that has been hanging fire for 14 years in national politics. It may even be law in time for the next general elections in the country. Of course, it will be...

YELLING dementedly, seven lawmakers mobbed the chairman of the Indian parliament’s upper house on March 8th and tore at the document, containing the women’s reservation bill, he was reading from. Yet the bill passed the next day, with the two-thirds majority needed to change India’s constitution. With broad political support, including from the Congress party that leads India’s coalition government and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the bill...

Overwhelmed by the victory in the passage of the Women's Reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha, women's groups on Wednesday asked the government to place it in the Lok Sabha at the earliest to sustain the momentum. “We hope that the United Progressive Alliance will do so immediately, and evolve strategies to address the possible obstacles to its smooth passage,” the National Women's Organisations — a collective of several groups —...

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...

Democracy is, everywhere, a work in progress. Like many other countries, India has imposed electoral quotas to improve the political empowerment of women and racial-ethnic minorities – that is, it has a political system that requires women to be elected to certain leadership positions. These rules represent a form of affirmative action, but they also resemble a feature of our own Constitution that reserves space in the Senate for two representatives...