Steps for empowerment

Reservation for women should not be just to get votes

After 27 years of back and forth, the Bill enabling reservation for women was again tabled in Parliament on Tuesday, that too in a special session, via the 128th amendment to the Constitution. It is sweeping in scope, guaranteeing the reservation of 33 per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha and Assemblies for women. The deadline is, however, some years away. If passed, it will come into effect after the delimitation exercise is complete, which is, in turn, contingent on the completion of the Census. This may not be a disadvantage because it will give the government the time to craft the rules with greater care. As has recently been observed in the expanding ambit of affirmative action as an instrument of self-interested political mobilisation, reservation for women could have similar unintended consequences if it is not accompanied by a practical programme to fulfil key socio-economic goals for them. A 15-year sunset clause, for instance, should be mandated as a hard stop — unlike the job and education reservation mandate for Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), which was originally introduced for 10 years but is still in existence. Similarly, the 70-year SC/ST quotas in the Lok Sabha and Legislative Assemblies were due to lapse in 2020 but have been extended by 10 years.

Though the initiative is welcome, it is critical that the law is not reduced to a token, box-ticking exercise to attract votes or bolster India’s ranking on global indices. The real test of the law will lie in how far it achieves its objectives of fulfilling the enabling conditions, such as access to education, health, nutrition and hygiene, and employment, for India to maximise the potential of half its population. This is not an unreasonable expectation as recent evidence has proved. In 2013, it was a multi-partisan initiative by women parliamentarians that ensured the passage of more stringent rape and workplace-harassment laws. Fulfilling the mandate in the Lok Sabha should be relatively easy because the representation of women has been increasing over time. But the states and Union Territories may face challenges. No state matches the national average. And in the Northeastern states and Kerala, states with traditional matrilineal societies, the percentages range from zero to 9 per cent.

That said, recent history has shown the limitations of constitutional provisions of influencing gender dynamics. Though India was one of the earliest countries, much ahead of many developed nations, to have conferred voting rights on women, the challenges of ensuring women’s political and economic empowerment have remained formidable. The poor participation of women in panchayats and in the labour force is indicative of that. It is significant that countries that have no parliamentary quota mandate (the US, UK), voluntary party quotas, or legislated candidate quotas (Australia, parts of mainland Europe) are among those with decent gender-equality records. On the other hand, few of the countries that mandate reserving seats for women in legislatures — Nepal, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, Niger, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Indonesia — can be described as beacons of gender justice. The exceptions here — Indonesia, the Philippines, and Bangladesh — point to the importance of the role dynamic economic liberalisation has played in gender empowerment. Economic growth, therefore, will always be the most valid enabler of gender empowerment laws.