Region: A third of the sky

Early May witnessed extraordinary scenes in India's Rajya Sabha, where women parliamentarians formed a protective cordon around Law Minister H R Bhardwaj as he tabled the 81st Constitutional Amendment, popularly known as the 'Women's Reservation Bill', which provides for a 33 percent quota for women in Parliament and state assemblies in India. Cutting across party lines, women MPs tugged and pulled, as they physically prevented Samajwadi Party members from tearing up the bill.

The melee in the Upper House is reflective of the virulent opposition to a women's quota, which has been hanging fire since 1996, when it was first introduced in the Lok Sabha. Thereafter, it had lapsed into oblivion until the ruling Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) revived the bill. With the Rashtriya Janata Dal's Lalu Prasad Yadav having relented, it is now the Samajwadi Party and the Janata Dal-United that have been carrying the flame of opposition to the bill, including with spurious demands of a 'quota within quota' for women belonging to the Other Backward Classes (OBC). It must be noted that these same parties have never demanded representation for OBC men, and also that there are already constitutional provisions in the bill for reservations for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates, thus making their claims of 'elitism' ring hollow.

But women in India might not be occupying reserved seats in Parliament or state assemblies anytime soon. The UPA, sandwiched as it is between its need to be politically correct on the one hand, and compulsions from allies and potential allies in an election year on the other, has completed the formality spelled out in the Common Minimum Programme to table the bill. But unlike previous occasions, when the bill, after being tabled in the Lok Sabha, periodically lapsed, the new legislation in all probability will remain in cold storage in the Rajya Sabha. No one is talking about enacting it.

Meanwhile, in Nepal, it is no coincidence that women have found a 33.2 percent share in the newly formed Constituent Assembly, the historic body that will draft a new constitution for the country over the next two years and also function as the interim government during that period. The unique electoral system included proportional representation, which ensured representation for marginalised communities such as the Janajatis (ethnic group) and Dalits, also laid down that at least half of the 335 members elected under this format must be women. In the absence of such an approach to redress the historical wrongs of poor representation, only the women candidates elected in the standard first-past-the-post system would have made it to the Constituent Assembly – less than 13 percent.

While Nepal made headway, May also witnessed the caretaker government in Bangladesh buckling under pressure from religious hardliners. Following violent protests throughout April by Islamist groups railing against the National Women's Development Policy 2008, the Ulema Committee, set up by the government to review the policy, strongly recommended scrapping the provision, which would reserve 40 percent of local-government seats for women. In 2004, an amendment to the Constitution reserved 13 percent of the seats in the Parliament for women.

Willing to test
Perhaps there has been a realisation that the entry of women into the public sphere cannot remain a token. Whether women bring a fresh perspective to politics, or whether they function like many other politicians once they occupy a seat of power, there is no doubt that voters at large are increasingly willing to test women in the political sphere.

In 1993, the 73rd Constitutional Amendment in India provided for 33 percent reservation for women candidates at the local self-government level, or the Panchayati Raj. These three million or so panchayat and corporation members now form the largest number of elected women representatives anywhere in the world. In the decade and a half that has passed since then, increasing maturity and political dexterity has shown many of these women to be skilled politicians, and not merely 'thumb impressions' for male family members who, it was feared, would direct their actions.

The experiment has also demonstrated that, in the absence of a level playing field in the hurly-burly of politics, women and other marginalised sections, if given a leg up, can often manage to perform at par. In what is a fitting testimony to the momentum generated by the quota system, Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh recently stated in Parliament that the actual representation of women in Panchayati Raj institutions stands at 42 percent, well beyond the reserved 33 percent. Perhaps it is this success that is fuelling the resistance to allowing more women to participate in decision-making at higher levels.

Many of the objections to reservation for women in politics smack of a reluctance to accept the realities of politics – the world over, but particularly in Southasia. The premise that men would continue to control politics through their female family members fails to recognise that politics is already largely family-based in most countries of the region. A large majority of men who enter politics do so because they are the brothers, sons and sons-in-law of politicians, and family resources are deployed in the bid to win or retain political clout. Proxy politics also extends to caste alignments, and women's quotas will merely mirror this trend. Opponents to women's reservations put forward the claim that it is only the 'creamy layer', or privileged section, of women who will benefit. But one does not see their concern extend to ensuring that men from poorer sections are able to enter politics, or to ensuring that women from marginalised sections receive training in order to be able to perform effectively as elected representatives.

Women occupy only 18 percent of parliamentary seats worldwide, with countries without quotas for women averaging less than 10 percent representation. Despite prominent women leaders having emerged in Southasia, these remarkable exceptions do not reflect the overall trend: India has only about 8.1 percent women parliamentarians, and Sri Lanka only 4.9 percent. Women deserve to be given a chance to hold up at least a third of the sky, if not half. In this, Nepal shows the way.