India's Upper House Passes Bill 'Reserving' 30% of Seats for Women
March 10th, 2010 by Robert Franklin, Esq.India's upper house of Parliament has passed a bill that would amend the country's constitution to require that 30% of MPs be women. Read about it here (New York Times, 3/9/10). Just how that would be accomplished, I don't know; the logistics alone look either farcical or enraging depending on my mood. But however I may feel about it, the bill was passed and it's just the first step of four required for a constitutional amendment to become effective. The bill would need to pass the lower house, be ratified by at least half the states and be signed by India's president.
Passage of the bill plunged the upper house into what the article variously calls "chaos" and "pandemonium." Factions opposed to the bill threatened to desert the ruling party, leaving it with a razor-thin majority.
Amazingly, the article makes no mention of the fact that such a provision is facially anti-democratic. The very concept of democracy means that the people choose who governs them. A law "reserving" 30% of parliament's seats to a certain group solely based on their sex plainly disenfranchises voters. What if they don't want Ms. X to hold office? Tough, she holds it anyway, not because she was voted in, but because of a pre-established quota.
Now, "reserving" seats may make sense if those who benefit are a minority. The argument would be that they can never achieve what they need by voting because there aren't enough of them. The same cannot be said of women who, not being a small minority, can vote themselves into office if they choose.
As in the United States, although women in India are roughly half the population, they make up nothing like half the elected MPs. But the appropriate response to that is not to fix the game - or even 30% of it - in their favor. The appropriate response is for women to work harder as candidates so they can appeal to more voters.
The other appropriate response is for Indian women to be perceived as the equals of men. That is, they must be legally equal and must also be thought of that way. That's a cultural change that must take place in order for true equality to reign. Just to state the obvious, goading Indians to view women as the equals of men is ill served by granting them more and more special rights and privileges.
I've often thought that, in the United States, one of the keys to greater female representation in local, state and federal offices is military service. If women were required to register with the Selective Service System and serve in combat units, the perception of male/female equality would be much enhanced. Like it or not, military service can provide a candidate for office a leg up on his/her opponent. But beyond military service, I think there's a broad public perception, on the part of both men and women, that women are still a privileged class, shielded from many of the rigors of life that males have to deal with. And until that perception no longer exists, women will remain a minority in elected offices.
Back to India, one of the comments to the article linked to pegs the legislation as a stalking horse for Brahmin caste elites edging lower caste MPs out of office. One of the comments about the piece makes enough sense that I quote it in full. It's by a gentleman named Ghulam Muhammed.
"Caste based" political parties in fact are protecting the majority of lower caste people of India, which are cleverly sidelined by the Brahmin caste comprising of mere 3% of the population together with the other upper castes of Kashtriya and Vaish, and have been ruling India in the name of a fake majority. The stranglehold of these highhanded upper castes is directly linked and strengthened by the new much publicized women's reservation bill.
The Bill in practice will make it that much impossible for lower caste political groupings to get even a proportion of their proportion of voting strength in Parliament and State Assemblies. So the propaganda of women's rights should not fool anybody.
The line up of 3 major political parties --- Congress, BJP and Communists --- to pass the bill is proof enough that all these Brahmin led political parties have ganged up to drive out the lower caste parties like Samajwadi Paty, RJD and BSP from the political arena. This is an open coup d’etat camouflaged as ‘Women’s Reservation Bill’.
The high-caste commentator with The Times of India, Dileep Padgaonkar translated his triumphalist comment to herald the 'last gasps of Mandalisation' --- Mandal reservations gave the lower caste the chance to enter the political arena.
It is shameful of Congress, the opposition Hindutva extremist BJP and the so-called secular Communist parties, to defraud the people as well as the world at large, by moving this retrograde anti-democratic legislation in the name of women. Only the high-caste women will end up further strengthening the upper caste stranglehold in India's power politics. The deprived cannot hope for any remedy from India’s skewed democracy and may resort to violent protests.
In other words, the 30% women's reserve is just a political ploy. That many women are going along with it says a lot. It says that they're having the wool pulled over their eyes; it says they value political expediency over democracy; it says that they don't see the obvious damage such a provision could do to their own cause; it says they're willing to kick their lower caste "sisters" to the curb (reminiscent of white suffragists doing the same to black suffragists in the early 20th century in the U.S.); it says that class makes more difference than sex, and it says that they still have some idea that privilege and equality can coexist.
Thanks to Mike for the heads-up.

































Cincinnati City Beat's Jacob Baynham has written a front page story on a high-profile Mullen-Hobbs lesbian custody battle in Ohio. In that case, lesbian biological mom (Kelly Mullen) and sperm donor (Scott Liming) are pitted against social mom Michele Hobbs. The child, 4-year-old Lucy Mullen, has resided with Kelly since the breakup of the Mullen/Hobbs relationship.
As we've explained, while Fathers & Families takes no position on gay marriage, we do defend the right of all fit parents to play a meaningful role in their children's lives, and Hobbs clearly has a parent-child relationship with Lucy.


