It would have been a revolutionary bill and a first for this part of the world. But whoever heard of parliamentarians voluntarily giving up their privileges? The Women´s Bill, reserving a third of the seats in Parliament and legislative assemblies for women, was cleverly scuttled by the very parties overtly supporting it.
Outwardly, of course, it was the two Yadav ex-chief ministers whose hooliganism won the day. Both Laloo Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav encouraged their supporters to create pandemonium in the House when the bill was introduced. One of them even went so far as to grab the bill, tear it up and hurl it at the treasury benches. The house was adjourned, an all-party meeting called in Parliament and the bill deferred "for the time being". This effectively has put it in cold storage.
The Yadavs´ ostensible argument was that the bill did not provide for a quota for women from the middle-rung of the caste hierarchy, the Other Backward Castes (OBCs). It seemed to matter little that the bill reserved 7.2 percent of the existing 22.5 percent quota for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes for women (which alone would guarantee at least 43 Dalit or tribal women in the next parliament, a number equal to the total number of female parliamentarians in the current House).
Both the Yadavs together command the support of only 37 parliamentarians in the 544-member Lok Sabha. How was it, then, that they were able to stall the bill on their own? The fact was that they received covert support from almost all the other major parties to kill the bill.