ATTEMPTS BY India’s government to pass legislation to empower marginalised women by reserving one-third of legislative seats for them failed yesterday after MPs opposed to the measure forced repeated adjournments. The vote is now expected to take place today.
The Congress Party-led administration was earlier confident that the Women Reservation Bill, stalled for 14 years, would garner the required votes to pass in the upper or indirectly elected house of parliament on International Women’s Day.
But both houses of parliament were adjourned several times as MPs from socialist parties, long opposed to the Bill, shouted slogans, even tearing up the draft and hurling it at the speaker.
They argued that the Bill – which would raise the number of women MPs in the 545-seat lower or elected house of parliament to 181 from the current 59 – will spawn a monopoly by upper-caste women at the expense of the underprivileged lower castes and religious minority Muslims.
Once passed, the Bill would also quadruple the number of women MPs in the 250-seat upper house and significantly augment their numbers in provincial legislatures.
“We are not anti-women but we want reservations for women hailing from minority and backward classes first,” said Mulayam Singh Yadav, MP and leader of the pro-Muslim Socialist party.
The Reservation Bill seeks to address the centuries long oppression of Indian women who were not only less educated than men but also suffered poverty, low social status and maltreatment.
And, since passing it involves a constitutional change, the vote of two-thirds of MPs in the upper house is required. It would then go before the lower house where a similar majority would be needed.
However, the government and some Opposition parties that support the Bill lack sufficient numbers of MPs to ensure its passage in the upper house which would result in its deferment.
Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born head of the Congress Party and one of India’s most powerful politicians, has strongly backed the Bill saying she attaches the “highest importance” to it.
But detractors, many of them women activists, claim the Bill is “retrogressive” and would segregate women rather than put them on an equal footing with men.
“Reserving a third of seats for women means that in future they will be confined to these seats and pitted only against other women,” said columnist Coomi Kapoor in the Indian Express yesterday.
A more progressive way would be to enforce the rule that all political parties reserve a third of their seats for women, she argued.