Give us our due
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COMMENTS 
The quota within a quota demand in the Women’s Reservation Bill should be encouraged because women from the minority, dalit, and tribal sections want to articulate their own issues and organise under their own leadership since the mainstream feminists have for long given step-motherly treatment to their issues, says Cynthia Stephen
The debate on women’s reservation in parliament continues to rage as we await the passage of the Bill in the Lok Sabha. There appears to be tacit opposition from the men in both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In what is perhaps a throwback to the not-so-distant feudal past where zamindars lorded it over their fiefdoms, most seasoned politicians who are elected (and re-elected) to parliament, treat their constituencies as their personal ‘bastions’. Mulayam Singh Yadav, chief of the Samajwadi Party, one of the staunchest opponents of this bill in its present form, claims that many men in the Congress and BJP, though they do not speak out, in fact feel aggrieved that the reservation for women has the potential to change this and drastically realign their political careers – not surprising, given the history of the Congress and BJP, both traditionally parties led by the upper castes and classes.
But the silence of those most affected in the debate – the women who are almost 50% of the population – is almost deafening. Other than the visible women parliamentarians who were seen exulting over the bill’s passage in the Rajya Sabha, few other women have gone on record on the matter. As the argument rages over reservations to the legislatures and parliament, grassroots women politicians fill local government bodies and work quietly and effectively at changing the face of governance in town and village. Given 33% reservations in the local bodies, women now hold about 40% of elected posts in the local bodies, contesting and winning even from general seats on the basis of their work for their communities.
In several states like Karnataka and Kerala, women appear to do a much better job at local governance than men, according to a study carried out in 2000 by Chathukulam and John. It is their presence (or lack of it) at the level of the legislatures and parliament that causes concern. Demands that women be given similar reservation to these bodies resulted in a draft Women’s Reservation Bill which has been unsuccessfully placed for ratification several times since 1996, when it was first tabled. Huge controversies around the bill resulted in it being in limbo for almost 15 years.
There are two main constraints to the issue of women’s reservation: on the one hand, there is broad agreement on the need for reservations among women’s groups after it became clear in the 1990s that political parties did not give women any priority in seat allocation or leadership. On the other hand there is the view that ‘woman’ is not a homogeneous category, and hence there is a need to recognise gaps in the representation of various categories in a highly stratified and fragmented polity and society such as ours.
While the present draft already provides for the constitutionally mandated reservations for scheduled caste and scheduled tribe women within the women’s quota, one of the major hurdles has been the demand that there be a quota within the quota for sections of the female population which are inadequately represented, namely women from the Muslim minority and the other backward classes (OBC) groups, which are a sizeable part of the overall population: this appears to be a commonsense demand. In principle, even if there is consensus (there isn’t, the mainstream parties do not agree) on the need for a “quota within quota”, as was first suggested by Janata Dal (U) party chief Sharad Yadav, in practice, there is a formidable systemic lacuna to prevent its immediate implementation – a lack of data.
“If this is insisted upon, then the process will be set back by 20 years,” said Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily at a press conference in Bangalore on March 25, 2010. “It will need a constitutional amendment, and we do not have the data on which to base the reservations because no data has been collected on the OBCs since the 1930s. As the census is ready to start we will have to wait till the 2020 census for the data; analysis will take more time, so all this will likely cause 20 years delay to pass this amendment.”
Muslims form 16% of the population, and have 26 male MPs in parliament (most of them from the elite ‘ashrafi’ sections) which works out to about 5% of the total. Clearly Muslims as a whole are not proportionately represented. According to the Association of Muslim Professionals, Mumbai, Muslim women are even more poorly represented in parliament, at 3 out of the total of 29 Muslim MPs, amounting to just about 10% of the total elected Muslim representatives in the country.
Further, they point out, constituencies reserved for dalits often have large Muslim populations, and Muslims lose the chance of election from these constituencies as the dalit tag is denied to Muslims. This is because Muslims and Christians of dalit origin -- two large religious minorities of India which together comprise 20% or more of the total population -- are denied the benefit of reservations following the egregious Presidential Ordinance of 1950 under which dalits who belong to the Islamic and Christian faiths are denied reservation benefits though dalit Sikhs and Buddhists do get the benefit. This ordinance is presently under challenge in the Supreme Court, but the government is delaying its resolution even though the Sachar Committee report and the Ranganath Mishra Commission have both insisted that the minority communities face discrimination in policy and practice.
The position of women from the reserved categories, however, is better than the rest, (though it still lags overall), says K S Sudeep in an article on the Roundtable blog: “Currently, the SC/ST reserved seats have a much higher women composition when compared to the ’general’ seats in Lok Sabha. Of the total of 59 woman MPs, 17 are from SC/ST reserved seats. Of the 121 SC/ST reserved seats, we have 17 women MPs (14.05%) whereas in general seats, this is 42 out of 422 (9.95%). But what do the marginalised groups – the dalits and OBCs – feel about the women’s reservation bill? After all, it is their rights that are being discussed. What is their take on the subject?”
“When one sees Sushma Swaraj and Brinda Karat embracing and congratulating each other on the passing of the women’s reservation bill, one feels suspicious. What makes these two women – from either end of the political spectrum – rejoice together?” asks A S Rajan, a senior dalit political activist. “Both of them belong to the upper class and caste, and have had a long political innings at the national level. Why do they agree so heartily on this particular issue?”
“When the first Lok Sabha was constituted, there were 369 brahmin members out of 540. But the numbers of brahmins went down steadily over time and in the prevailing Lok Sabha (their number dwindled) to 69. The reduction of higher caste representatives in parliament and increase in the number of representatives of subaltern categories may be attributed to enhanced political awareness, participation in the democratic processes and successful political mobilisation,” said Neilratan Shende, a young research scholar from IIT B, Powai, in an article he circulated on Sakya, a dalit e-group.
“It is ironical that the BJP, which was (and is) antagonistic to (the) Mandal Report implementation makes passing the Women’s Reservation Bill one of its priorities,” he continues. “Passing the bill in the existing format will have adverse implications for the women belonging to SC/ST and OBC communities. The representation to the women will be at the cost of not only quelling political aspiration of the SC/ST and OBCs but also at the cost of representation of the women belonging to oppressed section of the society. The bill also conveniently ignores (the) three-fold discrimination that women belonging to SC/ST and OBC background face not only on the ground of patriarchy and gender but also on the ground of their caste.”
In clubbing the OBC women with the SC/STs, Shende is voicing an increasingly popular perception among the dalit and OBC groups that there has to be a strategic unity between these two large subaltern groups if any lasting change has to occur in their status, and if the bastions of caste and class privilege have to be breached.
As representation of the upper castes has steadily deteriorated and the lower castes mobilised and consolidated their role in electoral politics, it gives rise to the suspicion that it is the threat to their political dominance from the lower castes that drives the brahmanical upper caste-led Congress, BJP and left parties to push for passing the Women’s Reservation Bill in its present draft. This will enable seats to be occupied by women mostly from the existing ruling class, as there will be no mechanism to ensure that the subaltern groups, namely the poorer and lower caste OBCs and Muslims will get their due.
The suspicion is further strengthened by the fact that the excuse of systemic constraints are conveniently used to explain why the bill has to be passed at this point rather than wait for the required data to be collected, as the law minister stated. There are data-collection centres countrywide that can be pressed into service. States have their own statistical units. There are several national research institutes and university departments that can take up the work.
In any case, states have their own lists of backward castes, SCs and STs, based on local situations. The 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments provide for states to formulate their own rules with regard to representation of the backward communities at the local levels. In Karnataka, the rules provide for reservation within the women’s reservation for BC women. Interestingly, in Karnataka Muslim and dalit converts to Christianity also get access to some reservations as they have been covered under the BC(A) category, perhaps an example that the centre and other states can emulate.
Thus if there is a real commitment to political empowerment of the growing numbers of the marginalised, it is certainly possible for states to make their own preliminary surveys in a shorter time. For instance, Karnataka’s Backward Classes Commission has been on the brink of undertaking just such a survey for the last several years. The ongoing political turmoil -- and fears of having to redraw political equations -- has been the only hindrance to its start.
Thus the timing of the bill raises suspicion of its intent, coming as it does on the heels of the recent developments as large sections of the marginalised and oppressed – OBCs, dalits and minorities – are coming together to challenge the hegemony of the brahmanical upper caste-class interests, which are a numerical minority in the country. It is justifiably feared that these interests are indeed trying to protect their control by bringing in women from their own ranks to fill the reserved spaces, thus achieving four ends at once: ensuring the hold of the upper castes and classes on power; earning praise and brownie points for ‘gender justice’ in the international community; correspondingly weakening the hold of subaltern men and further, keeping subaltern women subjugated and excluding them from power and influence.
To explain more clearly, mainstream women’s groups have for long decried the demand for ‘quota within quota’ as a patriarchal strategy meant to divide the unity of women. But it is these same groups which also tend to appropriate the voice, spaces and take on the representation of women in India, but fail to take effective and speedy action when women from the minority, dalit, and tribal sections continue to face blatant violations of their human and citizenship rights. Therefore the women from the subaltern groups now say that while they are in solidarity with the feminist groups on the issue of patriarchy, they want to articulate their own issues and organise under their own leadership, because the mainstream feminists have for long given step-motherly treatment to their issues.
Feminists spend most of their energy and resources organising vigorously on issues like legal reform for domestic violence, property rights, workplace rights, sexual rights, reproductive technologies etc, which are typically urban middleclass, and which are not the priority issues of subaltern women. For their part, the legal and policy establishment also respond positively to their struggles, and thus we are witness to many ‘progressive’ legislations and policies which give the impression that our traditional norms and taboos are now being breached. For instance, equal rights to property for Hindu women, the domestic violence bill, the sexual harassment at the workplace legislation etc, are all also applicable to urban upper caste women in the propertied and organised sections of society.
But the system is not as responsive to issues such as caste discrimination and violence, low wages, systemically-engineered poverty, denial of livelihood and opportunity for progress and exclusion from political representation, which continue to dog the lives of women from the poor and subaltern classes. Further, most mainstream women’s groups are conspicuous by their silence or at best make slow and very lukewarm and muted responses in the case of caste atrocities like rape perpetrated on dalit women such as the Khairlanji issue, of the denial of the rights of tribal women to land and forest rights, displacement, starvation deaths of children and the aged in tribal regions. Thus, the mainstream women’s groups, while challenging patriarchal norms at one level, are actually reinforcing the hold of Brahmanical caste-class interests at a much deeper level in this process.
There are few champions among elite activists for issues such as the poor quality of primary education, health and a non-existent public distribution system, transport, and drinking water shortages. Underemployment and unemployment continue to dog the lives of poor, rural subaltern women as they have for generations. Subaltern women will no longer accept being co-opted as in the past. They are now aware that leaders from the backward classes such as Uma Bharathi and Bangaru Lakshman are given short shrift in the BJP; that the left, for all its rhetoric on patriarchy and class does not have even one genuine subaltern woman as spokesperson; that the only dalits who are in positions of power in the Congress are actually from wealthy and politically powerful families.
The National Federation of Dalit Women in their list of political demands in their Charter of Demands released on June 26, 2009, asked for “33% to 50% allocation of seats at all levels of decision-making bodies, from gram panchayat/nagar panchayat to the Lok Sabha, cabinet, with priority to women, SCs, STs, OBCs, urban poor and minorities and 33 % to 50% seats in political parties to women.” Dalit-bahujan activists with Insight Young Voices, an e-magazine focusing on issues of the ‘reserved candidates’ in higher education, says: “We are working on our own demands to be included in the Women’s Reservation Bill and are opposed to the present draft of the Bill, and we hope to frame our own response shortly.”
Thus subaltern women, though their voices or opinions may not be heard in the mainstream media, are now aware of who their real allies are, and who works against their interests. They too are applying thought and using available spaces to get their voices heard, and join their voices to those of our OBC sisters and say, “We want our due, give us our quota within quota!”
(Cynthia Stephen is an independent Bangalore-based researcher and writer, focusing on issues of gender, development, poverty and exclusion)
Infochange News & Features, April 2010