INDIA’S UPPER house of parliament has overwhelmingly voted in a bill that would reserve one-third of all legislative seats for women.
After a day-long heated and often raucous debate, prime minister Manmohan Singh said yesterday that the 186-1 vote was a “historic step forward towards the emancipation of Indian womanhood”.
The Women Reservation Bill, first mooted in 1996 and consistently hindered thereafter, will now be moved in the parliament’s lower house next week where it is likely to pass as the Congress Party-led federal coalition is in majority.
It also needs to be approved by 15 of India’s 28 provincial assemblies before becoming law, but the principal hurdle has been crossed. The law would would eventually increase the number of women MPs in the 545-seat lower house from 59 to 181 in addition to quadrupling their number in the upper house.
Mr Singh’s government is supported by almost all the principal opposition parties, all with an eye to the electoral main chance in which women were crucial voters.
The vote took place yesterday after agitated socialist MPs opposed to the Bill in its current form forced parliament to adjourn on Monday and briefly twice again yesterday. They later boycotted the voting in the 248-member house but their absence in no way affected the bill’s smooth passage.
Earlier, the upper house suspended seven MPs because of their unruly behaviour the day before when they rushed to the chairman’s seat, shredded copies of the bill and tried to snatch his microphone.
However the errant MPs refused to leave the chamber, lying down on the floor amid loud and excited shouting, once again stalling debate on the bill and forcing parliament to adjourn twice. The debate resumed only after they were forcibly removed.
The bill is a long-postponed measure to right centuries of gender disparity in India where women continue to be subservient to men, deprived of education, economic freedom and basic rights.
Although India was one of the first countries in the world to have a female prime minister in Indira Gandhi and a woman president, conservative and macho Pakistan has twice the number of women MPs than its larger and seemingly more liberal neighbour.
In Nepal, a constitutional stipulation mandates one-third of all MPs be women and electoral laws require 50 per cent of all party candidates to be women.