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.