Uma Bharti (Courtesy: The Hindu)
I am not a big fan of reservations. However, after a whole lot of reading on the subject after the summer of ’06 when reservations for the Other Backward Classes (OBC) sent us all into a frenzy, I don’t think they’re the devil incarnate either. I see them now as a sort of stop gap measure – like taping up a hem that came loose. When the clamour to reserve 33% of the seats in the Indian Parliament for women resurfaced early this year, I couldn’t help but think it was the icing on the cardboard cake.
Why have women been demanding reservation in Parliament? Considering the female sex is not exactly an overwhelming minority in India (forming just less than 50% of the population), women have felt that there is something in the gatekeeping mechanism in politics that is keeping women out. Yes, this could be true in spite of the fact that we had a woman Prime Minister before Britain and now have a woman President. The fact is, not more than 10% of the MPs we have right now, are women.
But what if the blockage goes far further back than the political gate? What if it goes right to the many wood and iron fences of Indian homes? While Indira Gandhi was exercising her iron will over India – for better or for worse – only 22% of the Indian women were even literate. Today, we claim 54% are literate. This is only a figure though considering that the test of literacy is whether one can write one’s name. So, evidently women are being excluded from primary education. Why?
Well, according to the Social Development Report published in 2006, families do not educate their girls because (a) the anyway-she’s-going-to-be-a-housewife-someday attitude that makes fathers loath to spend money on sending a girl to school (b) The closest school is often in the next village/town. Considering the inherent fear in traditional families about sending a girl over long distances, alone, parents prefer to keep her home (c) There is no girls’ school in the area, and families don’t want their girls to “spoil their names” by going to a co-ed.
Each of these reasons really reeks of patriarchy. The woman’s burden of Izzat* is built into the psyche of India, and apparently, has not really been shown the door. The 2001 census adds an alarming fact to this: over 7 million little girls under ten were married. The population of married women under 18 years of age, added up to a rough figure of 95 million. Further, the growing impoverishment of female-headed households clearly indicates unequal distribution of resources at the basic level to women.
What do we want to accomplish by reserving seats for women in Parliament anyway? If all we want to do is give women the microphone I would think it an odd thing to do to reserve seats for women who have managed to get past the patriarchy, shrug off “Izzat” and make it to the elections. What we could do, on the other hand, is start chipping away at patriarchy. Whether this is done by establishing more schools (particularly girls’ schools), by educating adults through street plays and even the television (according to a survey conducted by an American University, the airing of Television programmes about women often reduces gender inequity in villages), or by taking microfinance to the remotest parts of the country, equity has to be established “bottom –up “.
As for reservations for women in Parliament right now, that’s only a measure from the top. Seriously, do women like Brinda Karat, Uma Bharti and Kanimozhi lack the resources to get themselves elected even without reservations? Considering that unless less fortunate women are actually empowered, socially and economically, they are hardly likely to compete, we stand in danger of not only facing yet another “creamy layer crisis” but also, of having puppet women and incompetent relatives of male parliamentarians fielded in these “women-only” constituencies.
We do have a problem on hand – there aren’t enough Indian women in national politics. The solution is not increasing space on the top floor alone, though. The way to politics will have to be rid of its patriarchy and the physical, sexual and career insecurities that women face as budding politicians will have to be attacked first.
*Izzat is an undefinable word that loosely means “respect” or “honour”. In many South Asian families women are expected to conform to notions of “purity” in order to keep the family’s Izzat
The Author Sneha Krishnan is an economics-obsessed, pasta-loving history student bound for Oxford this fall. She is usually found curled up in sofas with her ever-present macbook perched on some surface in the vicinity. Sneha first started thinking about doing Sa when she and Shweta realized that they were ranting about the day's news/ happenings practically everyday and everything they said had something to do with their feminist convictions. So they wondered how it would be to write about these things and more... and KaBoom... seven months and laborious code-learning (trial and error, the only method for us) sessions later, Sa came to be. Sneha’s favourite pastimes, besides feminism and Sa, are reading the New York Times, playing Scrabble and watching every movie that looks remotely interesting.
The Conversation