For helping to pony up a running cost of roughly INR 13 million per day, the average taxpayer of India would understandably hope that the halls of the country's Parliament would resound with eloquent debate. But in fact, the time spent on discussing serious issues is declining. Studies have variously put the time spent debating, for example, budget-related issues at an average of about 23 percent of the total during the 1970s, compared to just 10 percent today. Where has that time gone? With the forcing of adjournments and the disruption of proceedings being the preferred method of today's MPs to express dissent, precious little time is left for reason and debate. In March, the drama surrounding two pieces of proposed legislation – both of which would have far-reaching ramifications – make it evident that the democratic process still has far to go. And as process goes (or stutters) in the world's largest democracy, so too in countries around the region and world.
The Women's Reservation Bill, which has sought to reserve a third of the seats in the Indian Parliament for women, had been hanging fire since 1996. A lack of political consensus across parties, and a lack of numbers on the part of successive governments, has allowed the bill to languish for close to a decade and a half. However, under the stewardship of a tenacious Sonia Gandhi, and support from both the right and the left, the bill was introduced and passed in the Rajya Sabha. If it now makes it through the Lok Sabha when it is tabled (most likely at the end of the budget session in May), 181 of the 544 seats in that body and 1370 out of the 4109 seats in the 28 state assemblies would be reserved for women, on a rotating basis. Those are large numbers from anyone's perspective.
And large numbers can be frightening, particularly for politicians. Vociferous opposition from the socialist – mainly Yadav – lobby across parties has been couched in the purported concern that only elite women who would benefit from these sweeping changes. Unruly opposition to the proposal has already led to seven MPs being suspended from Parliament. Thereafter, the bill was pushed through the Rajya Sabha after parties supporting it issued 'whips' to their members, directing them to vote in favour. While whips are often used in mature democracies to gauge members' thinking on crucial issues, in India this has largely become a tool with which to enforce party discipline, with members risking not only expulsion from the party but losing their seat in Parliament. Such a forced consensus, while politically expedient in the short term, clearly poses the threat of deterring healthy debate, including within parties.
Indeed, in the sound and fury over what is little more than a reluctance to share a piece of the pie, several issues of real democratic importance have been completely glossed over. How, for instance, will the rotation of constituencies affect governance? Will increasing quotas (there is already one for Scheduled Castes and Tribes) change the nature of parliamentary democracy in India's first-past-the-post system? Should the reservation be time-bound? Meanwhile, purported concerns about potential 'proxy' candidates and the bahu-beti syndrome, or politicians fielding their wives and daughters on reserved tickets, hold no water in a context of the very real beta-damaad (son and son-in-law) dynastic politics – be it the Nehru-Gandhi clan, the Scindias or Reddys – where family connections determine one's political career.