IT IS time for a rethink on the Women's Reservation Bill. For all those who found the drama in the LokSabha infuriating, it is time for hard thinking. It is also time to look ahead and think of a fresh way out.Let there be no doubts about it. It was not just Mulayam Singh Yadav and co. who blocked the bill on May 6. Ifthe BJP and the Congress were determined, all the opponents could not have blocked it. Coming from a regimethat passed POTA in the teeth of widespread opposition, the touching search for consensus, the sudden surge ofrespect for the minority viewpoint makes impossible demands on one's credulity. The truth is that with theexception of the Left parties, the entire political establishment is responsible for the non-passage of theBill. Behind Sushma Swaraj's exasperation there was an unmistakable touch of relief. Relief that the Bill wasdead, and that her party was not going to be blamed.
Let us also be honest about something else. The now-dead Bill was a deeply flawed piece of legislation. Thosewho drafted it were absolutely right about the fundamental principles: the abysmally low representation ofwomen in our legislatures can and must be corrected through binding legal provisions. But in their enthusiasmthey paid inadequate attention to the mechanism they were proposing for realising their objectives. The Billproposed reservation of constituencies for women on the lines of that for Scheduled Castes and ScheduledTribes, with a provision to rotate them with every election. This would have meant that nearly half of theconstituencies would have been reserved for one group or another. Rotation would have meant that at leasttwo-thirds of the sitting MLAs and MPs would not go back to their constituency for re-election. This was aninvitation to disaster and would have robbed our system of whatever accountability it has now.
What then do we do? The ruling establishment would like us to forget about the matter till the next Lok Sabhais constituted. We can do better than that. The apparent deadlock on the Bill can and must be turned into anopportunity by agreeing to an alternative proposal that the political establishment would find difficult tosay no to.
This alternative has been around for some time and is known as the Election Commission Proposal. Firstoriginating in an article by some social scientists and activists in Manushiand subsequently endorsed in principle by the Election Commission, this alternative involves a compulsoryquota for women in party nominations. If accepted it would mean that the political parties would be requiredto field at least a certain percentage of women candidates, but would be free to decide where to field themfrom. A version of this method was recommended way back in the National Perspective Plan approved by RajivGandhi. This incidentally is the wisdom gleaned from global experience as well. If you care to visit thewebsite of the inter-governmental organization, International IDEA, you would discover that party quota wasthe route taken by most democracies where women did succeed in securing a decent political representation forthemselves. For some reason the original framers of the existing Women's Reservation Bill think that thisalternative is a poor and diluted version of their proposal. A close look would show that if formulatedcarefully to guard against possible misuse, the party quota method can meet the objectives better than theexisting Bill.
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It is important to understand the alternative being supported here before anyone rushes to reject it. Whilethe basic approach of the Election Commission is robust, its proposal is fairly open ended on details and cantherefore be misused to subvert the objectives of women's reservation. If a fresh alternative is to be workedout along these lines, it is necessary to be vigilant and firm about some of these points of detail. First andforemost, the women's quota must be compulsory and should not be reduced below one-third. It is believed thatthe Samajwadi Party and some other opponents of the Bill would prefer no more than a 10-15 per cent quota.This needs to be resisted. While there is nothing sacrosanct about the figure of 33 per cent, in the last fewyears it has come to be associated with the aspirations of ordinary women and the women's movement. Anythingless would appear to them to be a defeat. Also, one-third quota would ensure that even if initially the actualrepresentation is a little below this level, the presence of women in legislatures is still substantiallyabove a minimum threshold.
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Second, a specific provision should be made to ensure that parties cannot cheat by giving `losing' seats towomen. The simplest way to ensure that is to have a provision that the quota should be calculated at the Statelevel in a parliamentary election and at the district level in the Assembly election. This provision wouldensure that Laloo Prasad Yadav cannot fool the law by giving his party ticket to women only from Tamil Nadu!He will have to give one-third of the RJD ticket in Bihar to women. In an Assembly election he will have to doso for each district within Bihar.
Is this a sufficient safeguard? Clearly, 33 per cent of the party ticket to women is not a guarantee of 33 percent women winning elections. Parties might still try at least initially to give relatively weaker seatswithin each State and district to women. This may reduce their electoral success ratio and result in theirlegislative presence being lower than 33 per cent. But unless all the parties and the voters conspire, thereis no way the final proportion would be less than 20-25 per cent. Even this would represent a manifoldincrease over the existing average of 8 per cent in the Lok Sabha and 4 per cent for the State Assemblies. Inany case, no party that entertains any serious hope of winning a majority can afford to give up one-third ofthe seats as lost. In the long run, this method may also result in more women than 33 per cent winning theelections. The electoral record of women candidates in India suggests that their probability of winning anelection is a little higher that their male colleagues.
In other words, the party quota option is not a `dilution' of the existing Bill but a better way of realisingthe objectives. Besides, if this option were to be taken, the demand for a quota within the quota used to blocthe present Bill would lose much of its force. Under this system, parties can chose to give the ticket towomen in those areas where woman leaders of their preferred community are in a position to contest. If theparties do not nominate OBC or Muslim women under this alternative arrangement, they cannot blame the systemfor it. The alternative proposal has another advantage that it does not require an amendment to theConstitution. All it requires is an ordinary amendment in the Representation of the People Act. The partyquota could be made mandatory only for recognised political parties that occupy more than 90 per cent of thelegislatures. The political establishment has no justification for not passing it in the remaining life of thecurrent Lok Sabha.
While opposing the Bill, Mulayam Singh Yadav declared in the Lok Sabha that he is not opposed to the idea ofreservation for women and that his party would support a quota-based alternative. It is time to make him keephis word.
(Yogendra Yadav is a Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.)
