Not just ornaments

Leader of Janata Dal women's wing Pramila Dandavate once remarked that women are not flowers in a vase used to brighten up a drawing room. ...

Leader of Janata Dal women’s wing Pramila Dandavate once remarked that women are not flowers in a vase used to brighten up a drawing room. Perhaps she should repeat this valuable observation to Prime Minister I.K. Gujral. By inducting four women into his Ministry on Tuesday, he demonstrated his undoubted diplomatic skills but ultimately fooled nobody. To use Dandavate’s evocative analogy, it was a bit like putting a few more flowers into the vase for strictly decorative purposes. But the feel good factor cannot ever replace the make good factor, just as political correctness cannot mask policy failures. If the Prime Minister was so concerned about women empowerment within his own Ministry, he should have done something about it when he first constituted his team after the stormy interregnum that saw Deve Gowda bow out of the Prime Minister’s office. At that juncture, he preferred to plumb for the comfort of the status quo, with almost every minister save the unfortunate D.P. Yadav regaining the portfolio he or she had held earlier.

The Prime Minister almost gave the game away by commenting on the need to build a popular consensus for passing the Women’s Bill on the very day that Renuka Chowdhury, Jayanthi Natarajan, Kamla Sinha and Ratnamala Savanoor were sworn in. He thus made it patently clear that this unique exercise in ministry expansion was meant to deflect criticism on the manner the issue of the Women’s Bill was handled under his leadership. After all, at the time of his own swearing in on April 21, he had given a commitment that he would provide more political representation for women. The redoubtable Geeta Mukherjee of the CPI, by refusing the offer of a ministership and even threatening to resign from the Lok Sabha if the Women’s Bill is not passed soon, was just expressing her disquiet over these developments.

This newspaper has argued that the Women’s Bill serves no real purpose in empowering women politically because of its top-down approach and populist intent.

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At the same time, the hypocritical responses of the political class to the Bill cannot be justified on any grounds. Over the last ten months, it staged an elaborate charade of introducing the Bill, yet not quite introducing it; of welcoming the Bill, yet not quite welcoming it. Every delaying tactic in the book was employed to keep it at bay, from doing the disappearing act when the time to vote for it arrived, to referring it to a Joint Select Parliamentary Committee. Of all the political parties it is the Prime Minister’s own that must take a large share of the blame for this sorry show. Senior Janata Dal leader Sharad Yadav’s Parliamentary performance, when he prevented his own Prime Minister from speaking, is still fresh in people’s memory.

It would have been far better for the party to have arrived at a consensus over the inefficacy of such a Bill. Indeed, the United Front’s handling of the Women’s Bill has done little to build popular confidence in its ability to stand by its avowed commitments on other issues. The Prime Minister’s attempt to paper over the cracks by appointing those four women ministers is at best a gimmick and, at worst, plain hypocrisy.