FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

India is about to join another elite global list. This time, happily, it’s more about distribution of power rather than its accumulation. And we will be transforming ourselves in the process. In February 2019, a comparison of 193 legislatures around the world by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) saw India rank an abysmal 150th in terms of women’s representation. We had 66 women MPs, just about 12 per cent of a 543-strong Lok Sabha. Nepal ranked #36 with nearly 33 per cent; both Bangladesh (#96) and Pakistan (#101) had above 20 per cent. Even the 2019 general election, which gave us 78 women MPs, only took us to 14.4 per cent. In 2023, we are placed 141st in the world— far behind most major democracies. In short, the historic Constitution (128th Amendment) Bill (later changed to 106th Amendment) brought by the Narendra Modi government has not come a moment too soon. Reserving onethird of all seats in India’s Lok Sabha and state assemblies for women, we will finally be with the better side of the world.

Within India, what that will bring is nothing short of a revolution. In nearly six decades of general elections after independence, the ratio of women MPs never even touched 10 per cent. We crossed that mark only in 2009. And gender parity is still a pipe dream in the states. Currently, women MLAs account for a mere 7 per cent of the 4,000-plus assembly seats in India. For a representative democracy, this can only count as the deepest failure. This bill addresses that squarely. Yet, it did not materialise out of thin air. It was Rajiv Gandhi’s regime that formalised the idea of a women’s quota at all levels in the late 1980s. Its tortured passage, spanning nearly four decades, is quite instructive for the present. For the issues that bedevilled it in the past are still at stake. Rajiv’s panchayati raj, which was finally enacted in 1992 during Narasimha Rao’s reign as PM, effected a radical piece of gender justice in grassroots politics—some 1.6 million women are said to be invested with power in local bodies now. But the first edition of the Women’s Reservation Bill proper, meant to scale that up to the state assemblies and the Lok Sabha, had to wait till the Deve Gowda government in 1996. Despite strong votaries from all parties, the bill failed to become law. Subsequent iterations, during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh regimes, suffered the same fate.

None of these prime ministers got the support of twothirds majority needed in both houses of Parliament to pass the bill. That was largely because the Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal and other Lohiaite parties sought a quota within a quota for OBC (Other Backward Class) women— OBC leaders within the BJP too backed that. And Muslim parliamentarians sought a sub-quota for the community’s women. Sharad Yadav made the infamous ‘parkati’ (bobcut) jibe, implying that without an OBC sub-quota, elite women would corner all the reservations. Minus the misogyny, the issue is well and truly alive in 2023 and is set to become the biggest bone of contention with the present bill. That’s because the bill does not bring women’s reservation into effect immediately. Instead, it has been made incumbent on two rather humongous exercises preceding it in a sequence—first the national census, which is three years overdue, and then the delimitation of parliamentary seats due after 2026. The national census missed its decadal cycle due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021. It will take at least two years to grind through the gigantic logistics of what will be the biggest population survey ever in human history.

There is another major storm building over delimitation. Ostensibly, it has been linked to women’s reservation only because, with a bigger Parliament, men do not have to give up their seats for women. But there are other serious implications in this exercise. A population-based delimitation will bring a massive democratic skew in India, creating a potential northsouth divide. Southern states have performed far better in population control than northern states and, instead of being rewarded, would be penalised for their performance. Expect a lot of fire and smoke before that’s settled. Can all of this happen in time for 2029? It’s all a bit open-ended. For the BJP, however, a deferred implementation of the women’s quota suits its strategy. It removes the apprehensions of their male Lok Sabha members of having to give up their seats for women candidates in 2024 itself. More importantly, it would enable Prime Minister Modi to emerge as the champion of women’s equality. That would benefit the BJP in the upcoming five state elections as also in the 2024 general election. Women’s vote has become a coveted piece of political capital of late. More women are voting than men—from a lag of 16.7 percentage points in 1962, they outstripped men by 0.17 percentage points in 2019. Besides, Modi has been known to be a magnet for that part of the electorate, with schemes like Ujjwala and Har Ghar Nal Jal.

That’s why the Opposition has been complaining that this is another poll-minded ‘ jumla’ by Modi, where his party can reap the harvest before taking the trouble to sow the crop. In the parliamentary debate over the bill, the Opposition pushed for the immediate implementation of reservations. They also demanded that a proper caste enumeration be included in the census as they argued the backward classes had been given a short shrift by the 27 per cent cap because their actual numbers are much higher. The Opposition strategy seems to be to create another Mandal-like situation that would disrupt the consolidation of the Hindu vote the BJP has been striving for. The process of implementing women’s reservation would no doubt be challenging and contentious, but PM Modi can justly take the credit for turning the idea of empowering women politically into legislative reality. As he said in his first speech in the new Parliament: “Some moments in life fill us with excitement and hope. I hope we will all enter the new Parliament with the best of intentions, leaving behind the old negatives.” There cannot be a better new beginning.

July 27, 1998