Reservations about women

Affirmative action can be a tricky road

The overwhelming opposition from Nagaland’s apex tribal body, the Naga Hoho, to the Bharatiya Janata Party-led state government's proposal to reserve 33 per cent of urban local body seats for women in the upcoming elections is revelatory in terms of the depth of male chauvinism that afflicts society in this north-eastern state. Ironically, a state that claims special status within the Indian Union is entirely in sync with mainland India in terms of embedded male chauvinism. The Naga Hoho has said electoral reservations will violate the traditional constitutional protections guaranteed to Naga culture. This is disingenuous, not to say anachronistic, in 21st century India. “Customary law and culture” in any society that lays claims to modernity should not, after all, be disempowering for any one segment of the people. Plus, as several commentators have pointed out, the Naga Hoho's objections have less to do with ephemeral concerns about “culture” than about the hard fact of land ownership and property rights, debarred to women under tribal laws. 

Empowering women through the political process, the tribal heads fear, will dilute men’s domination in this critical area. This, too, needs to change, not because it is out of step with several judicial pronouncements over the past few years that have strengthened women’s rights to inheritance — the provisions are not perfect but they represent significant progress since Independence. In Nagaland, where women enjoy one of the highest literacy rates in the country — 76 per cent against an all-India average of 65 per cent — such exclusionary traditions should have even less place. Indeed, the state government has attempted an adroit argument around the issue of embedded traditionalism by suggesting that towns and cities are modern developments and, as such, cannot be construed as “customary culture”. Within the unique constitutional constraints that bind Naga society this is not an invalid point and would make a world of difference for Naga women. But as with the Triple Talaq controversy, the Naga Hoho’s opposition to women’s empowerment underlines again the urgent long-term need for a sensitively crafted uniform civil code that overrides the more egregious elements of personal laws among India’s myriad tribes and religions, including the majoritarian ones. 

Though affirmative action is sound in principle, it would be misleading to conflate the exceptional situation in Nagaland, where women are explicitly excluded by tribal law from the political process, with the ill-advised, 21-year bid to reserve 33 per cent of seats in Parliament for women, who are free to contest elections. Participation and representation are not necessarily the same as empowerment, going by the decidedly mixed experience in the panchayats. Today, thanks to reservations at this level, women account for around 40 per cent of elected representatives in panchayats. But this has to be set against the contrasting narratives: one, less than 14 per cent of women seek re-election and, two, the widespread intimidation and violence against elected women representatives by men and the widespread shameful tradition of “sarpanch patis” in which the woman serves as a proxy candidate for her husband. 

If our policymakers’ intention is to leverage affirmative action to enhance the status of women, providing them with a fast-track detour into the country's highest legislative body is unlikely to generate universal acceptance or advance the status of women. A more durable process would be to incentivise education and health care for the girl-child and women, a process that may be less conspicuous but will enable them to compete for jobs and careers — and, indeed, run for Parliament — on their own terms and in their own right. Social change is a gradual process and the cause for gender equity would be best served if successive governments approached the issue from bottom up rather than top down.