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Politics around empowerment

THE ALL-PARTY MEETING convened by the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, on International Women's Day last Friday to evolve a political consensus in Parliament on the longstanding proposal to reserve 33 per cent seats for women in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies has — as in the past — failed to bear fruit. But what is likely to decisively seal the protracted debate on the subject is Mr. Vajpayee's announcement at last week's meeting of his willingness to go for a vote on the Bill should a consensus continue to elude Parliament. This latest statement has to be viewed in the context of his observations earlier this year that coalition politics was ultimately to blame for his Government's failure to enact the law on women's reservation. The readiness to jettison the so-called "politics of consensus" and the recourse to the will of the majority in Parliament may show up divisions within the secular Opposition parties. This could be the BJP's real gambit in a pre-election year. Although the BJP, the Congress and the communist parties, besides some of the regional parties have been consistent in their support for ensuring guaranteed representation for women in legislative bodies at the national and State levels, deep controversy has characterised the Bill ever since it was first introduced in the Lok Sabha way back in 1996. This time around, the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Shiv Sena and the Shiromani Akali Dal are among the parties which refused to endorse the Bill in its current form. While their stance carries the appearance of substantive differences, these merely mask underlying attitudes which are if anything inimical to the spirit of the Constitution 73rd and 74th Amendments that are a precursor to the current Bill. But Mr. Vajpayee has dared to seek a majority on the issue; and this could put an end to the frequent recourse to delaying tactics that sabotaged the Bill in the past.

Three distinctive viewpoints have been articulated on the question of securing greater representation for women. They range from the mainstream preference for a Constitutional Amendment providing 33 per cent seats, the proposal emanating from the Chief Election Commissioner placing the onus on political parties to allocate a percentage of seats to women candidates, and the insistence by smaller parties on a sub-quota for women belonging to the Backward Castes within the framework of a 33 per cent reservation. Each of these betrays differing strands of opinion on the gender perspective. The first has been widely acclaimed as reflecting the democratic sentiment; especially the provision to accord Constitutional backing for the law. The need for Constitutional sanction is, if anything, borne out by the barely 10 per cent representation of women in every Lok Sabha since 1951. The second proposal has been viewed, with good reason, as a dilution of the rationale for providing an assured representation for women. Here again, past experience does not warrant undue optimism about the willingness of political parties to cede electoral space for women. The third plea, namely, for a sub-quota is clearly a diversionary approach. It fails to take into account the relative levels of representation already achieved by backward castes within the existing framework and the need to broadbase the ambit of positive discrimination to include women.

While the party arithmetic in Parliament may in itself be sufficient to translate the women's reservation Bill into law, there are no quickfixes when it comes to contending with patriarchy and the prejudices inbuilt within socio-political structures. To that extent, the presence of women in representative bodies at various levels of the political hierarchy is but a beginning, albeit a landmark one, in putting in place mechanisms intended to challenge discrimination on grounds of gender.

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