Empowering the woman..... or is it so?
The women's reservation bill reserving one-third seats for women in Parliament and state legislatures has got through the Rajya Sabha but it has polarised politics and civil society. It may be the most consequential act of lawmaking since independence.
It may make for great politics for one leader after the other to give sound bites on the bill but that does not take away from the fact that it is the easy way out for a nation which 62 years after independence has failed to give its citizens (read women) the wherewithal to grab their due without reservation.
How far will women’s reservation empower women and the society? There are questions on its provisions as they have been reported. The bill seeks to bring more women into parliament by reserving seats.
While this widens the choice for the voter by putting women leaders into circulation it also decreases the choice of candidates for voters in reserved constituencies.
It has to be seen how the bill balances these concerns.
Then there are details like rotation of reserved seats. If a seat is reserved for the next round of elections, what incentive will the sitting (male) member have to nurture the electorate? Will one term of reservation be sufficient for the women members to fight the next election by themselves?
There are doubts on whether women who do make it to the parliament on the strength of reservations would be ‘representative’ enough. The “quota within a quota” only partly and unhelpfully flags this issue.
The “representative” character of the male candidates who are elected year after year is not questioned with the same vehemence. Yet one cannot ignore the fact that money power and nepotism rule in candidate selection. Is the bill going to remedy that? If we have a woman representative who is elected through the same creaky electoral machine that relies on black money, backroom deals and influence peddling then is she going to be different from the existing elected representatives?
Is being a woman enough to “represent” women? In the absence of meaningful inner- party democracy and electoral reforms, is the bill just going to window-dress the republic?
Nevertheless, there are those who root for the passing of the bill. The feminist movement nearly disappeared after women had received the right to vote. During the mid-1900's, however, increasing numbers of women entered the labour force. They found that many high-paying jobs were closed to them. Feminist groups fought to end educational and job discrimination against women. Large numbers of women entered law, medicine, politics, business, and other traditionally male fields. Feminists worked for wider availability of birth control information and legalized abortion in some countries. They also called for men and women to share child care and other family responsibilities.
In parts of the country women have been compelled to commit suicide against the male charges of witchcraft. Many innocent women and girls are exploited in acts and activities of human trafficking conducted by their male counterparts. These weaknesses are due to their marginal role in policy making programmes.
Throughout history, many societies have held women in an inferior status as compared to that of men. Women's lower status was often justified as being the natural result of biological differences between the sexes. In many societies, for example, people believed women to be naturally more emotional and less decisive than men. Women were also held to be less intelligent and less creative by nature. But research shows that women and men have the same range of emotional, intellectual, and creative characteristics.
Many sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists view that various cultures have taught girls to behave according to negative stereotypes (images) of femininity, thus keeping alive the idea that women are naturally inferior. The socialization of men and women are done according to their sex. The entry of women in every field, establishing their identity and making a mark in every sphere can help to provide a better place in society for them.
But then one can say there are other linked issues to question the bill too.
Any self-respecting woman would want to be where she is because she deserves to be there, not because of her gender. If the state has failed to bring women to that level, then there is hardly anything reservation can achieve.
That could be in the form of the Laadli scheme that the Delhi government started for girl children of families with annual income of below one lakh — the government pays certain amounts of money linked to the girl’s educational progress so that by the time she is ready to go to college there is a corpus of Rs 1 lakh available to her — or CBSE’s scholarship scheme for the single girl child or any other forms of incentive to encourage families to give the same kind of facilities to girls as they give to boys.
Reservation is an acknowledgment of the failure of the state and the political system represented by the likes of some leaders who talk social justice and gender injustice in the same breath.
How much impact will the bill really make and on which side of the scale, only time will tell.
Acknowledged Sources:
IBN
Times of India
Reuters
Meri News
