Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
The politics of the ruling dispensation in India in the last decade has typically been a politics of backlash against the inclusive socialism of the United Progressive Alliance. Along these years, we have noticed a gradual nationalisation of the core ideology of the conservative Hindu family system where the man was the patriarch and the family, his property. Women were to be defined as mother, daughter, sister or bhabi (sister-in-law) and the patriarchs laid down the law, both within homes and outside.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
There was a simultaneous dilution of earlier government programmes like the MGNREGA and food subsidies, along with substantial changes in the admission policies, syllabi and faculties in institutes of learning. All this slowly eroded much of the free choices that had become available to the women and the marginalised courtesy various rights movements, progressive laws and judgments from the apex court. During and after COVID-19, this resulted in major losses for working women in all categories.
Given this background, the law granting 33% reservation to women in the legislature is certainly a positive step.
The law, conceptually, is three decades old and began stirring when 33% seats were reserved for women in the Panchayati Raj system. The parties then in the opposition had declared it a non-starter but with 2024 general elections looming large over the horizon, women’s vote bank has an undeniable power of deciding the fate of the next government. The same rightwing that had played a role in blocking the passage of the Bill then chose to rebrand it as Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam – a most progressive step taken by the government in Amrit Kaal.
During the voting on the Bill, all the well known female politician baiters within the legislative bodies and political parties thumped their tables in happy assent.
Even those who had registered their displeasure against 33% reservation for women on grounds that so many strong wilful women would pose a threat to our men and their masculinity (paurush and purusharth), were made to eat their words. Like chastened school boys when the bell rang all of them voted for the Bill as ordered.
The fact remains that in 2024 the powerful National Democratic Alliance leadership is pitted against two major female leaders – Sonia and Mamata Banerjee with their vociferous troops of younger ones like Mahua Moitra, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, and Supriya Shrinate, with Priyanka Gandhi bringing up the rear.
According to legal luminaries the new law is a positive step, but it can be implemented only after the Census (last held in 2011) and time consuming delimitation exercises are completed and their results calculated and announced formally. Then there is the question of the women in Other Backward Classes communities. They want a quota within the new quota – same as their sisters from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes communities do. So nobody can tell the nation when the complex and time consuming exercises will begin and end, and how exactly the women in the OBC category will be included. Women should thus expect no miracles this once in ticket distribution. It will most probably be the same old, same old with a few usual freebies like comparatively ‘cheaper’ gas cylinders and grains thrown in.
Another interesting point concerns the contrast between repeated finger-wagging criticism of the dynasts and the fact that a woman’s family will still be the first criteria for a woman’s selection as an electoral candidate.
Be it noted also how Bollywood actors storming in to fill the void created by feminists and liberals have been speaking into every available TV mic with gushing words of praise for the visionary new beginning for Nari Shakti or woman power. Their proximity to power might be an early indicator of which way the wind is blowing for the selection of woman candidates. For the time being, men remain the political gate-keepers in most parties. It is no secret that men of a certain age are likely to confess that women candidates in India are less likely to win unless backed by a powerful clan and community.
There is no denying that women in India have come a long way from our parliament of 1952. Then, out of the total 499 seats in the Lok Sabha, a mere 22 (4.41% of the total) were occupied by women and in the Rajya Sabha also, they numbered a mere 7.31% of the total. Their numbers in the last (16th) Lok Sabha rose to 11.23% of all (543) seats and in the Rajya Sabha, they were 11.62% of the total number.
But they have a long way to go yet before they come anywhere near the present day number of women parliamentarians in some other developing countries. Even Rwanda (56.3%) and our neighbouring Nepal (33.2%) have higher figures.
Soon after the NDA, led by the rightwing BJP, came to power in 2014, an ebullient Prime Minister Narendra Modi assembled his most trusted brains from the party’s think-tank to create an image of his government as a progressive force. Empowerment of women was showcased by giving charge of the ministries of human resource development, finance, external affairs, food processing, and Ganga cleaning to women MPs.
But for ordinary women, one of the key takeaways from the past five years of NDA rule has been that even powerful women within the ruling party may not get their due. Their frequent TV appearances, dazzling lives and participation in global dos, can barely hide a guaranteed obedience to the male leadership. Or else, when women athletes were protesting against their abuse or tribal women paraded and groped naked on streets, they would not have remained silent.
Women storming into parliament alone can reveal for the first time in India, how much of the state as we saw and experienced was determined by dominant social relations and the operative laws and instruments of a male state. If a state is built on the relative powerlessness of 50% of its citizens, (only one-tenth of whom are represented in the lawmaking legislative bodies), could it ever see how male power in India (even in Amrit Kaal) is synonymous with state power?
As things stand today, and will during the 2024 elections, formally, the state remains male. It will legitimise itself by imposing its own view of society as rational and the only acceptable one. Since the fabled reservation is perhaps not going to become a reality in the lifetime of my generation, we shall, until we live, be seeing women groups clustered around a beaming male PM, like happy sheep.
When they finally do, women getting 33% reserved seats in parliament and assemblies will usher in a truly revolutionary scenario. Because as Thomas Kuhn wrote, true political revolutions will often change political institutes in ways that they themselves have prohibited.
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.