|
Book Review
Women in politics
PADMINI SWAMINATHAN
|
Essays on affirmative action for increasing the presence of women in Parliament
|
RESERVATIONS FOR WOMEN: Meena Dhanda — Editor; Women Unlimited, an associate of Kali for Women, K-36, Hauz Kaus Enclave, Ground Floor, New Delhi-110016. Rs. 600.
This volume brings together different positions taken on the issue of reservation of seats for women so as to increase women’s presence in the Lok Sabha given not only the current abysmal numbers of women in Parliament but the fact of women’s declining numbers in almost every successive election to the Lok Sabha in India after Independence. The collection of articles has been grouped under four broad themes: historical background, theoretical issues, women as policy makers, and alternatives to the Women’s Reservation Bill (WRB). For want of space this review will only touch upon a few of the many interesting but currently irresolvable issues discussed in the different papers.
The road travelled
A glance, for example, at the contents of the Statement issued by the then three leading women’s organisations to the Joint Select Committee in 1935 clearly depicts the long road travelled and the complete turnaround that has ensued on the theme of reservation. The 1935 Statement unequivocally asserts: “By merit and merit alone do we wish to find — and we are confident we will find — our rightful place in the councils and Federal Legislatures of our country. It naturally follows that we are opposed to reservation of seats for ourselves and are whole-heartedly in favour of joint electorates by which means alone, we are convinced, can India rise to her full stature.”
That the above statement masks the torturous route that the issue of reservation has taken and the fact that caste and communalism are vital to an understanding of the theme of reservation is well brought out by Mary John, according to whom, “The resurgence of caste and minority issues within a ‘women’s issue seems to take us right back to the pre-independence years, but with at least one difference: five decades after independence we are forced to recognise the divergent post-independent trajectories of ‘gender’, ‘caste’ and ‘community’.”
Under-representation
While much heat continues to be generated on the “dreary tale of under-representation” of women in politics, and on viewing the current “under-representation of women in elected assemblies as a problem,” very few have grappled with the theoretical basis of the arguments proffered for raising the proportion of women elected. Anne Phillips’ 1995 piece on Quotas for Women is till date the most cited work questioning the validity of arguments advanced for gender quotas. It is significant that research pieces, post-1995, commenting/discussing the Indian Women’s Reservation Bill in particular or the more general theme of reservation of seats for women, have hardly contributed theoretically to the issue. Most writings, including those contained in this volume, either concentrate on sketching the context in which representation and reservation needs to be viewed or are caught in the nitty-gritty of the details of the Bill and its operational implications.
Shirin Rai makes a strong plea for what she calls a “more self-reflective analysis” of what increasing representation on the basis of gender alone may mean in practice, and of what may be erased in the process. In her opinion, since there is no simple correlation between an enhanced visibility of women in political institutions and a sense of empowerment of “women” in the polity in general, the questions of who is being empowered and what is being empowered is intimately tied to questions of relations of power and to issues of difference among women on the basis of caste.
Meena Dhanda suggests that paying attention to identity concerns could provide a more fruitful way of understanding the opposition and support for the use of gender quotas in ensuring the representation of women in legislative bodies. Nivedita Menon places her survey of positions on the WRB into a set of three interrelated questions, namely, ‘women’ as the subject of feminist politics, citizenship in post-colonial democracies, and the idea of political representation. The paper ends by raising a number of questions to which, as the author herself admits, there are no easy answers/resolutions.
Local level
The papers under Section III provide extremely useful information on how reservations at the local level have enabled women’s presence in public life. The diversity of these experiences as well as the thin nature of evidence to support attempts to portray that women make a difference, does not, however, detract from the fact that but for the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution, the marginalisation of women from public presence would have not only continued but also deepened as has happened at the national level. The question that this section raises but fails to engage with adequately is why the transition from the local to national level is proving intractable.
Section IV is an attempt to discuss alternatives to the WRB. Useful as these details are for those interested in issues of operationalisation of a scheme, very little attempt has been made by the editor to discuss the papers analytically and/or place them in a theoretical context. In fact the book as a whole contributes very little to raise the theoretical level of discussion on reservations for women.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Book Review
|
