THE POWER OF SHE
Two evenings after Christmas, I steeled myself for a task I truly abhor—call a stranger and have a formal conversation. Only the thought that hundreds of others from Shakti—a non-partisan group I’d recently joined—were also steeling themselves across India made me not suddenly develop a headache. The group had only just formed in November but was impressively focused on its one-point agenda—get more women elected as MLAs and MPs.
In its short lifespan, Shakti had managed to organise an eye-opening national event of women politicians from parties as diverse as the BJP, Congress, JD(S), AIADMK, DMK and NCP. Soon after, the Congress officially backed the Women’s Reservation Bill. The BJD has already been campaigning with other parties to boost support for the bill. It was a good moment. In December, we agreed on a direct-push strategy: call the people we’d elected and pressure them to discuss the Women’s Reservation Bill this winter session.
I’m still at a stage in which I find it wonderful to be around people who are strategic but idealistic about politics. As Cynthia Stephen, an independent journalist and social policy researcher, remarked about Shakti, “it is a group with a necessary naiveté.”
But now it was time to call an MP and I was choking. I had the facts: the representation of women in Parliament and state assemblies was a lowly sub-10 per cent, so poor that a UN Women study had ranked India at 148 among 190 countries. At the same time, the thousands of women elected to local government, under the 33 per
cent quota, have a higher win rate than men.
I tried half a dozen numbers from my list. Wrong numbers. Unanswered phones. Then one MP answered. My carefully rehearsed script fell apart and I babbled, but she was kind and said, of course, she backed the bill. Buoyed, I tried more numbers. Next, the polite PA of another MP answered and said his boss backed the bill, no problem. The next PA asked me to text my request and then politely confirmed that Shri MP would get my message. A most unprecedented hour passed swiftly.
By next morning, we had an exciting tally: over 500 callers from 18 states, ranging from farmers and women in IT to rehabilitated manual scavengers and entrepreneurs, had called 373 Lok Sabha MPs; 130 MPs had taken our calls. One young volunteer said the MP she’d called mocked if he was going to lose his seat to her. Another MP said he was going to focus on raising the representation of Muslims and another discussed the merits of proportional representation. Of the 130 MPs who took our calls, 127 said they support the bill. “Those are millions of voices that the 127 MPs represent and that is very heartening,” says Tara Krishnaswamy, co-founder of Shakti.
One MP told a Shakti caller that multiple opposition parties had been trying to raise the issue of the Women’s Reservation Bill for several days, but the government was highly resistant. On December 28, we saw P.K. Sreemathi Teacher of the CPI(M) raise a question in Zero Hour about the bill with support from several parties. The BJP seemed to be dodging the bill, though it was a key promise in its 2014 election manifesto. In the spirit of necessary naiveté, our embryonic group is willing to imagine that the government’s position can change.
To maul Carly Rae Jepsen, “Hey, I just elected you and this is crazy. But here is your number. I am gonna call you, MP.”
WOMEN FORM A LOWLY SUB10 PER CENT IN PARLIAMENT AND STATE ASSEMBLIES