In a Premchand story that I can’t recall offhand, part of the job of an unpaid male agricultural worker, a chamar Dalit to boot, was to put up with the tantrums of the zamindar’s wife.
He was her physical attendant, which in a quaint way breached the caste barrier if all too briefly. For usually it was the upper caste zamindar men who played havoc with the lives of young chamar women across rural India.
The women’s reservation bill, which was passed on Tuesday in the Indian parliament’s upper house, amid chest thumping and angry walkouts, claims to reserve one-third seats for women MPs but that is hardly likely to change the lot of the chamar men, much less their women. And they are not the only dispossessed Dalits and other Indians we know of. The bill’s critics — and they are representatives of backward castes, Muslims and of course Dalits and tribespeople — say that it is a Brahminical ploy to further marginalise them in parliament and outside.
Of course the critics of the bill are themselves not paragons of virtue. As a matter of fact, the three main opposing parties belong to the Yadav community of the socially orthodox middle caste farmers. Regressive Muslims, their parliamentary strength already pared down substantially, and who fear that the women’s quota would completely count them out of the fray, are its other critics.
Thus the main proponents as well as detractors of gender quotas are looking at the issue from their myopic prisms. The critics don’t have the cultural wherewithal to field women candidates and the current set of its supporters have not displayed any vision to identify women’s problems much less do anything about it.
How are the parliamentary quotas going to change the reality of men and women alike that leads to large-scale female foeticide across the nation every year, more so in the economically prosperous states? How are they going to change the life of Salma a Delhi housemaid whose grownup daughter has stopped going to school because the boys in the neighbourhood and in the school see her as prey?
How many millions of girls do not go to school because there are no segregated toilets for them? How many girls and boys do not study because they do not have the resources and in the case of girls, the parents are not inclined to educate them?
What makes the move for women’s reservations suspect is that there is no known correlation between the emancipation of women and their strength in parliament. In spite of its current strength of 22 per cent women in parliament (against 11 per cent in India) Pakistan held 127th place among 130 nations in a 2008 global ranking by the World Economic Forum of women’s social and economic status. The only countries ranked lower were Saudi Arabia, Chad and Yemen. On the other hand, the present US Congress has 17 per cent women all of whom have fought their way up there without the crutch of reservations. Are the American women doing badly? Do they need a 33 per cent quota?
And if gender-based reservations will not make a difference, why stop at one-third? Why not make it at least half of parliament to fully represent the number of women there are in the country?
Some would say hand over power to women if for no other reason than because they are more likeable than men, and probably make better administrators. But that is where we need to pause. Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, the Sheikhs of Bangladesh, Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, Sri Lanka’s Bandaranaikes — they were as much creatures of their system as Barack Obama is of his, forget the supposedly progressive colour of his skin.
Another country that has a higher — in fact the highest — number of women deputies in parliament is Rwanda: 66 per cent. But that’s because its male population was greatly depleted in the massacres of 1994.
It is curious that the Congress-led coalition government and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led opposition have joined hands to push the bill through the Rajya Sabha. Being a religious revivalist party, the BJP’s support for the bill becomes immediately suspect. Some of the cultural and religious mores it promotes have been questioned by liberal Hindus and are perceived as patently anti-women.
It was a bold film called Lajja that exposed the hollowness of the revivalist agenda of the BJP. The film furiously rejects what it sees as the humiliation of a woman protagonist by her husband who puts her through a test by fire, literally, to prove her fidelity. The BJP sees in this act the essence of Indian virtue, indeed nationhood.
When regressive stereotypes are promoted as iconic by obscurantist Hindus, it puts them at par with Muslim men who see it as their duty to keep their womenfolk in purdah. The Congress, the main proponent of the women’s bill, is widely perceived as a softer version of the BJP’s Hindutva and is by no stretch of the imagination a party of Nehruvian liberalism.
In fact ever so often in its new avatar it has put the religious agenda ahead of its secular promise. It subverted the constitution as its first option in dealing with the Shahbano case of a divorced Muslim woman, in shepherding the Rushdie affair and triggering a raging row over the Ayodhya temple issue. Its views on women are rooted in the religious doctrines shared by the BJP. Its leaders once wanted to give Sonia Gandhi a dip in the freezing waters of the Ganges, possibly to underscore her religious rectitude.
Looking at the TV images of the bonhomie that came with the vote that was passed without discussion and after seven MPs were suspended, one could only marvel at the warm embrace between the left and the right of the spectrum.
The BJP’s Sushma Swaraj who had sworn to tonsure her hair if Sonia Gandhi became prime minister in 2004 had transformed into her kindred spirit. Communist deputy Brinda Karat, whose party’s political calisthenics had helped launch the BJP’s political career in 1977 before reviving it again in 1989, was locked in a long and moving embrace with Sushma Swaraj. And both the women leaders were roundly thanked and blessed by Sonia Gandhi.
In a sign of the times we live in, in the Rajya Sabha of India (though not the Lok Sabha yet) ideology was suspended briefly on Tuesday. But outside parliament, life continued without any promise or hope of gender-based remedies, be it in Kashmir or in Nagaland or in the forests of Chhattisgarh and Orissa where young women and their men continue to be hounded by the heavily armed state and its associated corporate houses for daring to resist the planned theft of their natural resources.
It is the entrenched exploitative system that needs to change, not the sex ratio in parliament.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Mohammed Abbasi 