Abstract
One could not have asked for a more timely collection of thoughtful and critical essays on the issue of women’s reservations than the volume edited by Meena Dhanda. It addresses the seemingly intractable theor-etical and political questions that any serious social science scholar (and scholar of the humanities) would confront on the Women’s Reservations Bill (WRB), currently pending in the Indian Parliament. In the process, it offers tools to navigate the conceptual maze surrounding the constitution of women’s political identity and representation, interests, constituency, differences and their workings in the electoral democracies of post-colonial countries like India. Do we see identity and interests as shaped by historical and political factors or shaped through ‘social’ experiences or as simply ‘natural’? Is political representation in a democracy merely abstract and numerical or should it reflect the interests of the group that it represents? Can a group (here of women) with considerable internal inequities of caste and class hope to be represented by unmarked repre-sentatives? Should the conceptual impasses posed by the WRB trump the experiences gained through the implementation of the same in the structures of local governance in India since the 1980s? And shouldn’t the proposed amendment be thought of as a harbinger of a thorough change in the current Indian democracy rather than as an additive measure?
Adopting a well-argued out position on the issue, Dhanda takes the reader through the set of essays laid out in four sections—historical back-ground, theoretical issues, experiences of quotas in action and a sample of the alternative bills in circulation. The section on historical back-ground gives the reader a sense of the shifts within the women’s move-ments on this issue. Excerpts from petitions of women’s associations in the 1930s (Sarojini Naidu, Begum Shah Nawaz and others) convey the strong opposition that the advocates of women’s equal rights had to ‘special privileges’ such as reservations. The turn to reservations for in-creasing the representation of women (Lotika Sarkar and Veena Mazumdar, Towards Equality) came after the ‘daughters of independence’ observed that while the reservation policies for Scheduled Castes and Tribes instituted at the founding moment of the Constitution, kept them in the representative bodies, the number of ‘women’ steadily came down after Independence. Have the fault lines that emerged during women’s groups’ rejection of reservation for women in the 1930s shaped the con-tours of women’s reservation question vis-à-vis representation of the other minorities in post-Independence history? ‘Perhaps’, Mary John contends. She points out that the women’s groups’ adoption of the abstract idea of citizenship aligned with the Hindu-secular formation around Gandhi who rejected separate representations for depressed classes and Muslims. She also asks if the support for the current women’s reservation bill does not also emerge from a similar Hindu-secular formation in the 1990s.
The essays in ‘Theoretical Issues’ interrogate the implications of women’s reservations for feminist politics, representative democracy, gender justice and women’s empowerment. Nandita Shah and Nandita Gandhi articulate the doubts and dilemmas of post-Independence women’s movement activists confronting the Indian state on a range of issues. They also discuss their proposal that purported to incorporate their concerns and interests into mainstream politics. Phillips sets out to demonstrate the impossibility of finding a coherent and justifiable theor-etical argument for women’s quotas on the grounds of women’s ‘presence’ in politics, women’s ‘interests’ or ‘representation’. Dhanda takes on this supposed impossibility to point out that it arises from adopting ‘conse-quentialist’ arguments whereas women’s quotas need an existentialist justification, in terms of what should be done, given the conditions of women, reluctance of the political parties and compulsions of electoral democracy. Shirin Rai argues that the connection between ‘reservations’ and ‘empowerment’ can at best be tenuous, given the latter’s arrival in the wake of globalisation. Placing the support for WRB amidst the main-stream discomfort about the number of Backward Caste parliamentarians in the post-Mandal political context, Nivedita Menon contends that specific quotas are needed at this historical juncture. In a post-colonial society where democracy has come in along with group representation, she argues that the demand for women’s reservation has to go beyond the ‘politics of presence’ to align with other democratic demands for group representation.
Do quotas work? How? The next set of four essays explores the actual experience of Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes and women’s reser-vations at the Panchayat and Municipal levels that came into operation with the seventy-third and seventy-fourth Amendments. Gail Omvedt presents the experience of Shetkari Sanghatana and all-women’s panchayats in Maharashtra as positive. Stephanie Tawa Lama-Rewal forays into the unfamiliar territory of Municipal corporations, to test the many hypotheses around WRB and presents a textured analysis of the workings of reservations in the complex web of political parties, rotation system, party workers, political inheritances and voters. She points out that reservation has increased women voters’ access to municipal corpor-ations though women’s issues still remain outside corporation politics. Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo argue that reservations for Scheduled Castes and women have succeeded in making Scheduled Caste inhabitations get more resources and in highlighting women’s concerns such as drinking water on the basis of a detailed survey of Birbhum dis-trict in Bihar and Udaipur in Rajasthan. R. Geetha’s essay presents the disparate picture emerging from across the country after the imple-mentation of reservations, where there are ‘unexpected surprises’ such as the Indian Muslim League of Kerala fielding several women can-didates, despite taking an anti-WRB stand. The last section of the book, ‘Alternatives’, contains alternative proposals to WRB by Madhu Kishwar, Gail Omvedt, Jayaprakash Narayan and others, along with Vasanthi Raman’s intervention. Many writers in the volume engage with these proposals.
While dealing with the question of reservations for women in legis-lative assemblies, the volume draws on and contributes to the growing debate on minority representation in liberal democracies. More import-antly, it does so by placing it in the messy world of party politics, com-plex histories of minority relations with the Indian state and dilemmas faced by those movements that seek to increase the representation of minorities in the electoral democracies as they exist today.