The Hindu : National / Elections 2004 : 33 p.c. seats for women? You've got to be joking

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Wednesday, Apr 07, 2004

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National - Elections 2004

33 p.c. seats for women? You've got to be joking

If Bihar is anything to go by, gender discrimination is rife when it comes to nominating women candidates, says K. Balchand.

Bihar's politicians may talk of reserving 33 per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha for women. But the number of women who have been given tickets by political parties in the coming elections is dismal.

Though all political parties have given women a raw deal on this count, the worst among them is the one which made the most noise about reservation for women in Parliament - the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Though the BJP is contesting 16 seats, the party has not fielded even a single woman candidate. In other words, forget about 33 per cent, we are talking zero per cent representation here. Its ally, the Janata Dal (United), is only a little better: the party has merely retained its sitting MP in Khagaria, Renu Devi. Of course, to be fair to the JD (U), some of its members did oppose the idea of one-third reservation of seats for women on the floor of Parliament.

It is surprising that the number of tickets doled out to women this time by all the major parties put together is no more than six thus far, the lowest in over half a century since 1952, when there were only three women candidates, two of whom won the elections.

Though the highest number of women candidates in the fray was in 1991, when 32 sought to break the patriarchal set-up, only three of them succeeded in making it to the Lok Sabha. The best ever representation was in the 1984 general elections, when nine out of 16 candidates in the State were elected, backed perhaps by the sweeping Congress wave.

That was the only time when the representation of women worked out to a healthy 18 per cent of the 54 MPs, who represented the undivided Bihar in the Lok Sabha. Even in 1999, 20 women contested the elections with five of them making it to the Lower House of Parliament. Five other women candidates stood second in their constituencies.

Sadly enough, the other party that made a big deal of its commitment to the cause of women's representation — the Congress — has nominated just one woman in Bihar. She happens to be Meera Kumar, the daughter of the late Congress leader, Jagjivan Ram, who will be contesting the reserved seat of Sasaram.

The Rashtriya Janata Dal, which made no bones about its opposition to the reservation bill, demanding instead classification along caste lines, has done no better. It has only retained its sitting MP, Kanti Singh, but has shifted her from the Bikramganj seat to the Ara constituency. The move to shift her might seem to indicate that women too were prone to the anti-incumbency factor and caste considerations, much like their male counterparts, and that women would not necessarily vote for their own sex.

In the case of the Lok Janshakti Party, it would appear to be a case of nepotism. Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav, the Lok Sabha MP from Purnia, now in jail in connection with the murder of Ajit Sarkar of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has fielded his wife, Ranjitha Rajesh from the Saharsa seat.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) alone has fielded two women, the widow of Ajit Sarkar, Madhavi Sarkar, from Purnia against Pappu Yadav, and Shushila Singh, whose husband too had been murdered, from Buxar.

Under the prevailing circumstances, it is certain that Bihar will not be improving on its 1984 performance of sending nine women to the Lok Sabha.

In fact, it would be a major achievement if the State can manage a 10 per cent representation of women in Parliament out of the 40 MPs it sends to the Lok Sabha, after its bifurcation in 2000. In all fairness, Bihar's performance in 1999 was not too bad; it sent five MPs and was second along with West Bengal, which too sent an identical number of women to the Lok Sabha. They were second only to Uttar Pradesh, which had nine women MPs in the dissolved House.

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