The Bill for reservation of seats in the Parliament for women has been there in the Parliament for an enormous amount of time, but nothing solid has been achieved upon it as it has been thrown around, delayed, thrown some more, and delayed a lot more. It has elicited a lot of public opinion, many NDTV Big Fights would have been held on this, and similar to this, many blog-posts would have been written. It basically says that one-third of the seats in the Parliament should be reserved for women, because of the current woeful representation(59). Some politicians like Sharad Yadav have made it clear that ingesting poison would be better than passing this bill.
The idea for writing on this came from a post my friend made here. Now if you read his opinion, the point which he makes is that the same liberals, who oppose reservation on the basis of caste, have no qualms reserving 33 % of the Parliament for women. Now, from this statement, my first conclusion is that since I agree to this, I am defined a liberal. And as a justification for my argument, I would say that I am not opposed to reservation on the basis of caste as such. During the Arjun Singh fiasco, when he introduced reservations for OBCs in educational institutions, I was not aghast at reservations being introduced in “premier” institutions like IITs and IIMs. I was rather against the fact that reservations are still needed, when they were supposed to be phased out after implementation in two 5-year plans, i.e. if this was 1950, I would not be against reservation on the basis of caste. Even now, reservation on the basis of financial status, albeit a little lesser than 50 % is fine with me, it is almost equivalent to giving scholarships to people who need it so that they can study. But reservation on the basis of caste now, I am against it simply because it has lost its status as a means for supposedly lower-caste people to join the mainstream and has become a shortcut for ‘affluent’ ‘lower-caste’ people to good education and jobs. I mean, the Gujjars were creating a riot 2 years back because they wanted to be declared as a ‘backward’ caste! Is that signs of a successful reservation system? I don’t think so.
Now coming to the reservation for women in the Parliament, I support it because of the same reason that I would have supported caste-based reservation in 1950 or financial status based reservation now – the representation of women in the Parliament is low, and it needs to increase. Now people may say that since this is a democracy, everyone has an equal right to being a representative of the people, and there should be no reservation in the Parliament. I disagree. I say, that would have been true, if ours was a perfect democracy, and women were treated here like they are anywhere else in the world. Since that is definitely not the case, hence rules for a perfect democracy cannot and should not be applied to India. Instead, we should bend the rules a little bit, so that India moves towards that dream democracy that it is not, but is trying to be. My idea is, reservation for women should be introduced, but with a clause. It should be phased out after 5 elections. Hopefully, in the course of these 5 elections, women will start getting adequate representation in the Parliament, things will start working out better for women in the country, and then, we should remove the quota in phases to find that the no. of women doesn’t substantially change, even though the quota is gone. This was the basic idea behind caste-based reservation way back in the 50s, and hence I support both of them.
There are some people who are saying that caste-based quota should be introduced within the women’s reservation in the Parliament. But as there is no caste-based reservation for the men in the Parliament, why is there such a need for women. Also, caste and vote bank politics ensures that welfare of ‘lower caste’ is adequately represented in the House. Ergo, I am against that too.
Bottom line is, I believe that supporting reservation for women in the Parliament while opposing caste-based quota in educational institutions and jobs is not hypocrisy. The Women’s Reservation Bill is long overdue in the Parliament, and I believe it should be passed.
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7 comments:
Don't you think sensitization and education are better ways of dealing with backwardness than reservations? Strike out the problem at its roots. Gandhi bettered the plight of untouchables not by doling out reservations but by trying to bring about social change. Same for, say, practices such as sati.
Have caste reservations achieved their objective even after so many years? No they haven't. Affluent castes want to be classified as backward, while those who really need help - whether they be Brahmins or 'scheduled caste' members - in rural areas who *really* need help don't get it. I reiterate that I believe any support measure should based on econonmic stature. I'm not asking for reservations for the poor, I'm asking for financial aid to support the poor in whatever they want to do.
What will reserving seats in the Parliament for women do? Nothing at all. Sections of society which are prejudiced against women will remain prejudiced against women. Five elections later no progress would have been made and the reservation would be extended.
Let's say the Bill does get passed. How will it be implemented? I reckon by setting aside constituencies from where only women can contest. This doesn't *necessarily* mean that the contests are capable administrators. (I don't refer to education here. Somenody can be a middle school graduate and still be a capable administrator.)
This is why I said that sensitization and education is the way forward. Not reservation. Unless the problem is solved at its very root superficial measures will not help.
Agreed.
Let us say that there is a tree that is blocking a view and we have to cut it down (please don't bring environmental concerns here, this is a hypothetical situation). Now we have to cut it down such that it doesn't grow again. Wouldn't it be easier if we cut off the branches on the top and the side first, before we take it down and take its root out?
Achyuth....ur explanation is absolutely baseless.
Also the fact that u know that ours is not a prefect democratic country is a good enough reason of not providing quotas.
You also mention that rules must be bent a bit,but then who decides the limit??
First of all, when you say it is baseless, then your argument is truly 'baseless' unless you point out to me where I am wrong.
Secondly, ours is not a perfect democratic country, and hence I still stand by what I said. Reservations is not a permanent solution. I never said it was. You must remember that caste based reservations were introduced in a time, where almost all of the lower caste people were poor and treated like scum. Hence that move was made, although it was made with a clause that it should be removed in phases after 10 years. That it was not done, points out the lack of spine of the politicians rather than the failure of the system itself.
As for a perfect democracy, what I meant by perfect was where there is only a reasonable amount of difference in socio-economic status of different people. What we need to do, is temporarily make that small, and then strike at the roots. Giving another analogy, when a cancerous growth is to be removed, chemotherapy is done first to reduce its size, and then it is surgically removed.
What I meant by bending the rules was bending the right to equality to introduce reservations. Temporarily. And for how long, I have mentioned that.
@Achyuth: If you really want to use lumberjack analogies, then no, you don't cut off the top branches first. Even for giant sequoias you chop them off from the bottom, yell "Timber" and run the other way. ;)
On a more serious note, I don't think reservations would work because it *hasn't* worked for caste based reservations. What has that *really* achieved over the past few decades it has been implemented? Not much at all. It's all right to say that you want to restrict the reservation for a few years, but it doesn't achieve much in those few years either. Labelling a group of people as 'scheduled castes' perpetuates the belief they're lower down the social order. As I said, those who really need help - and most of that is caused by financial hardship - aren't getting what they need.
Until social sensitization is brought about these things will never end. Unless we remove 'backward' tags for, say, Dalits they will always be considered so by society at large. I agree that women in cities are better off than women in villages. But how did they get there? Not by reservations, but by urban families understanding that a girl child must be educated, respected, given freedom to work if she wants, etc.
Well, thanks to reservations, now there are affluent families amongst the so-called lower castes as well. And I repeat again, I am not for caste-based reservation now. When it was introduced, caste-based and financial-based were the same thing. They were poor. Now, it is not. Basically, in earlier days, if you were of a higher caste, you were respected and held in high regard even if you were poor. But due to the very materialistic world that we are living in today, if you have money, people forget your caste and flock around you. Thats why the basis for reservation should be moved from caste, to financial status. Hence I root for financial status based quotas, so I don't think there is much of difference in opinion between us when it comes to caste based reservations.
When it comes to women's reservation, I agree that social sensitization has to be brought about, but simultaneously reservations should also be introduced. Taking another analogy, you can explain to a small child of 5 why he needs to go to school, but that won't suffice. You have to make him go to school compulsorily at first, so that when he grows up he can realize that he needs school and there will be no compulsion from his parents after that.
p.s. I love using analogies, and I agree that the lumberjack one was a bad one, but the cancerous growth thing that I used in my comment before this one is true, and it applies.
Hi all,
I see that no female has commented on the above blog entry. Let me be the first one to do it.
Do you really think that parliament is the right platform for giving extra benefits to women or uplifting them. In the parliament, we dont want more women or more participation form another segment of the society. What we really want is better administrators for our country. we dont want individuals representing their respective communities in the parliament. Rather we want individuals who have the power to look beyond their personal and social boundaries and act for the good of the country.
Moreover, we have already seen the plight of reservations in our country. How they finally lose the meaning for which they were implemented originally. It is time that we start learning form our mistakes. It is time that we understand, that calling a particular segment of society backward would always keep it backward.
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