Weekend Musings-Reservations for Women in Parliament

The Indian political firmament has been ablaze since the government decided to introduce a bill in the upper house of India’s parliament (Rajya Sabha), allowing a 33% reservations of seats for women in both the houses of the parliament as well as all the state legislatures. The introduction of the bill on the International Women’s Day last week saw a ruckus that would make a fish market proud. The members disrupted the house proceedings and had to be marshaled out for the bill to be voted on and passed.

While all this drama unfolded in the parliament the nation debated the merits of the bill and the risk the government is taking in pushing it through. My own thoughts on reservations for women in parliamentary bodies are ambivalent. Let me explain.

I am fortunate to hail from a family, where my grand mother (who recently passed away aged 105) received education in the 1920’s at the prestigious IT college in Lucknow, participated in the freedom struggle and after independence won assembly elections for the UP legislative assembly in the 1950’s. My mother taught at a University, my sister went to the medical school and my wife who coincidentally attended the same college as my grandmother, works in a play school in Delhi. At my current work place we have more women than men and in the hospitals I worked in earlier, we had women in stellar roles, as doctors, surgeons and nurses. Thus my views on women empowerment have been shaped by these women in my life.

I have always believed that any country that hopes to be counted amongst the leading nations of the world must empower its women to participate in all manner of decision-making. They should have equal opportunities in all walks of life and should compete with men on equal footing. In a progressive, enlightened society that we hope to create being a woman must never seem like a burden.

The real question thus is how do we empower women to build a just and a fair society and are gender based parliamentary reservations the right steps?

Unfortunately in the past gender based political empowerment has rarely led to significant change in the lot of women in our country. Is there any evidence that in states such as UP, which is ruled by Ms. Mayawati, life has improved for women? If one was to compare the rule of Ms. Rabri Devi in Bihar and that of the present chief minister, who happens to be a male, it becomes evident that Nitish Kumar has far better championed the cause of development and growth than his predecessor. The same could be said for Jaylalitha’s rule in Tamilnadu.

In a sense the 1993 legislation reserving seats for women in the local bodies and panchayats was a far more progressive step as it significantly empowered women at the grass-roots level and allowed them to usher in change in their lives as well as those who lived in the villages. The ability of a ’sarpanch’ in a village to fight the entrenched male dominated system and impact lives is far more than that of a woman legislator sitting in parliament. Yet, the change has been painstakingly slow and in large parts of the country hardly visible.

The real empowerment of women in any society is a function of their education. We need many more better educated, confident women to drive the change we as a nation are seeking. The government must consider reserving seats for women in centres of higher education, take punitive measures against parents who force their daughters out of schools and colleges, reserve jobs in government bodies and PSU’s and allow women financial freedom as well as the freedom of unfettered choices in the matter of living their lives as they please.

Now, if the argument is that, since men dominated legislatures have failed to deliver in the last many years and we need women law makers to do all this than by all means let us reserve seats for women in our legislatures.