By Rajdeep Sardesai
Competitive credit-taking is part of the cut and thrust of politics. The BJP boasts that the passage of the long pending ‘historic’ 33 % women’s reservation bill in parliament is because ‘Modi hai to mumkin hai’ (if Modi is there, it is possible). Sonia Gandhi asserts, ‘Bill hamara hai” (the bill is ours) and harks back to Rajiv Gandhi’s contribution. While the two chief protagonists slug it out, the truth is the only reason that the women’s reservation bill is finally becoming law is because the woman voter has come of age: the ‘mahila’ vote bank is arguably the most prized for any leader or party.
Armed with a full majority in Lok Sabha, the Modi government had nine years to push ahead with women’s reservation. Yet, it chose to prioritise its core ideological issues, be it Ram Mandir or Article 370. Now, with just months to go for the general election, the prime minister is keen to be seen as a flag-bearer of ‘nari-shakti’. (woman power). So what if the Modi government is conspicuously silent on the grave sexual harassment charges made by India’s Olympic medal-winning wrestlers against its Uttar Pradesh strongman and MP, Brij Bhushan Saran Singh. The aim is to seize the narrative and encash the women’s vote bank ahead of the crucial 2024 elections.
The Congress too was in power for ten years at the Centre as part of a coalition government. In 2010, the Congress-led government passed the women’s reservation bill in Rajya Sabha but failed to pilot it through the Lok Sabha where intransigent allies, mainly from Hindi heartland parties, refused to budge. Now, severely downsized in parliament, the Congress needs the woman voter more desperately than ever.
Take also K Kavitha, Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) leader and daughter of Telangana chief minister, K Chandrashekhar Rao, who has been projecting herself at the vanguard of women’s reservation by agitating over the issue. The BRS has released its first list of 115 candidates for the Telangana elections that are due this winter; only seven of them are women. If Kavitha and the BRS were committed to womens reservation, why didn’t they ensure more party tickets for women?
In fact, except for the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and the Trinamool Congress (TMC), no other party has walked the talk on women’s reservation. The BJD gave a third of Odisha’s 21 Lok Sabha seats in 2019 to women in keeping with the 33% target. The TMC fielded 17 women in West Bengal’s 42 Lok Sabha seats in 2019, an impressive 41 per cent, and gave as many as 50 women tickets in the 294 member Bengal assembly in the 2021 state polls. That Mamata Banerjee is India’s only woman chief minister has perhaps made it easier for TMC to break the glass ceiling for women.
Contrast this with the BJP which in the prime minister’s home state of Gujarat gave just 18 women tickets out of 182 constituencies in the state elections last year. While the Congress might have coined the ‘Ladki hoon, Lad sakti hoon’ (I am a woman, I can fight) around Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s leadership by reserving 40 % tickets for women in Uttar Pradesh’s elections last year, the party gave just 11 women tickets in the 224 member Karnataka assembly this year, one less than the BJP. Clearly, caste and winnability took precedence over gender when the stakes were higher.
Which is why the ‘nari-shakti’ sloganeering across the political spectrum is hollow posturing, a cynical attempt to exploit the woman voter for instant political benefit. The significant rise in women voter percentage – from 46% in 1952 to a record 67% in 2019 – is perhaps the most striking demographic shift in Indian electoral politics. A woman with an independent voter identity, detached from her domineering husband, has forced political parties to re-formulate their election strategies. From toilets to bank accounts to gas cylinders, women have been prime ‘labhartis’ or beneficiaries of government welfare programmes, both at the Centre and in the states. Almost every party, be it the BJP in Madhya Pradesh, the Congress in Karnataka or the Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab is providing direct cash benefits to women voters. A woman-centric political strategy that was pioneered by the likes of Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu is now practiced in every corner of the country.
Ironically, while the woman voter is being wooed more aggressively than ever before, recent data suggests that women’s participation in the labour force is declining. According to a 2023 International Labour Organisation report, the employability gender gap in India is over 50 % with only 19.2% women in the labour force compared to 70.1% men. Cash hand-outs to women by ruling parties cannot be a substitute for creating genuine gender equality in society.
So will the carrot of reservations transform a male-dominated political milieu? One of the reasons why the women’s reservation bill leaves the date of implementation unclear by linking it to future census and delimitation exercises is to buy time for the political leadership to convince male politicians that their careers aren’t being jeopardized in the race to woo women voters. The idea of rotating one-third seats every five years makes most men politicians anxious that their well-nursed constituencies could be lost to women candidates who might emerge as potential competitors in the future. This anxiety when women reservations were first implemented in local bodies and panchayats has led to the phenomenon of ‘sarpanch pati’ where male relatives (often husbands) of elected women run the office in place of them.
This sense of unease hasn’t disappeared amongst well-entrenched patriarchal political hierarchies which is why the parliamentary consensus cannot be guaranteed to hold over an extended period. Which is also why the real challenge for party leaders lies ahead: the present legislation is drafted like a post-dated cheque which the BJP hopes to encash electorally right away while the opposition has few options apart from demanding a sub-quota for OBC groups. Once the celebratory din dies down, gender-based turf wars may erupt once again, exposing more political fault-lines.
Post-script: Amongst the list of stalwart women leaders who spearheaded the womens reservation movement, a standout name is of Communist Party of India MP, the late Geeta Mukherjee. As a tireless crusader for women’s rights, Mukherjee was chairperson of the Joint Select Committee of parliament on womens reservation. It is the legacy of doughty left-wing activists like her which has been cemented forever, ironically by a right wing government.
(The writer is senior journalist and author. mail: [email protected])