Once more with feeling

When it was first mooted, the Women's Reservation Bill (WRB) was promoted as a legislative innovation. It soon degenerated into a farce. I...

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When it was first mooted, the Women’s Reservation Bill (WRB) was promoted as a legislative innovation. It soon degenerated into a farce. Indeed, the WRB has set a new record of sorts. It must be one of those rare Bills which has been brought up innumerable times before Parliament, only to be put on the back burner indefinitely. This time too, it was cleverly postponed until the penultimate day of Parliament. The purpose behind this slotting is clear. The later it is presented, the easier it would be to scuttle it, of course! Although the likes of Sharad Yadav — remember his acerbic comments about women with “short hair” — are usually blamed for the Women’s Bill not becoming law, the main reason is obvious. All male MPs and MLAs, regardless of party affiliation, stand to lose from it, ergo, they have no desire to see it translated into law!

This time the Bharatiya Janata Party has, it seems, another ace up its sleeve. It is reportedly making serious backroom efforts to arrive at a "consensus" on amending the Representation of People’s Act. The intention is to make it mandatory for all recognised political parties to select at least one-third women candidates for all the Lok Sabha and Assembly seats they contest. The Election Commission is supposed to oversee this exercise. Although the BJP unofficially claims that they are ready to initiate a discussion on this proposal, clearly there is very little time to do this in this session at least. There are anomalies that need to be addressed, of course. For instance, while the turnout of women during elections is on the rise, even at a faster rate than that of men, their representation in both Parliament and the assemblies is on the decline.

But will the new proposal to let political parties reserve one-third of their tickets for women help at all? Some argue that while this does not amount to a definite quota in legislatures, it provides an opportunity for women to contest elections in much larger numbers. Moreover, there won’t be the problem of reserved seat rotation that mars the WRB. But there are disadvantages in this approach too. Political parties which are not serious about women’s reservation — which includes the overwhelming majority of them — will most likely field women for those constituencies that are considered "unwinnable". However this argument, although it is often cited, is a flawed one. The winnability factor is more a myth than political high commands would like to acknowledge. After all, the ratio of the number of women winning, to the number of women contesting, is higher than the number of men winning, to the number of men contesting. In other words, by any objective measure, women are far more likely to win than men.Of course, if the new move emerges as a "consensus" proposal then, like the Model Code of Conduct, it will have no legal binding. But if legal binding is to be the criterion for the new proposal it may, like the WRB, never see the light of day.