Sometimes, I just don’t understand what is going on. So help me. Most of the issues I don’t understand involve the state, politicians and pseudo-liberals. Take first the women’s Bill — enthusiastically supported by the two major parties in India, the Congress and the BJP, and a small coalition fighting for survival in the national political landscape, the Communist parties. As speculated in “Women’s Bill: Women smart, men smarter?” (Business Standard, March 13), the timing of the Bill seems to have been exclusively to get pats on the back from international pseudo-liberals. It was the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and what better way to honour it than an insulting-to-women piece of legislation — reservations of one-third seats in Parliament for those who can prove their womanhood.
From countries as far apart as Rwanda and Sweden (also in the history books but with a lot more respectability), there have been different attempts at the knotty problem of how to speed up the process of women’s involvement in politics. In Rwanda, seats are reserved for women in permanently defined women constituencies where only the women are allowed to vote. More sensible than what an ancient civilisation divined — in a hurry to be noticed on Women’s Day — as a rotating constituency where women will fight for justice. Since it will be a lottery every five years (perhaps sooner given the era of coalition politics), all a politician, he or she, has to do and will do is to maximise the loot they can accumulate in the short time they are in office. Serve the people — hah! Ask the Election Commission how they have certified that expenditures in the Lok Sabha did not exceed more than a paltry Rs 2.5 lakh per candidate, when everybody knows the going rate, higher for the major parties and higher still for the winning parties, is at least a hundred times more. Of course, expect the pseudo liberals to come up with the specious argument, supported by data and experiments, that what works in a local panchayat of a few hundred people will work in an area involving several 100 times more.
How does Sweden, today the country with the largest percentage, close to 50 per cent, of female representation in Parliament, do it? Via an agreement among the political parties that they will nominate women candidates in 50 per cent of the constituencies. No Constitutional amendment, no picture in Newsweek magazine, no plaudits from psuedos — but effective.
Apparently, for several years now, former Election Commissioner M S Gill has circulated a suggestion very much along the Swedish line. In their haste to be so so applauding, how many pseudo liberals in the media informed you of this fact on the Women’s Day, or earlier, or later? A strikingly uniform objection to the Swedish model in my article was that the major (and minor) parties would circumvent the noble intent by nominating frivolous women candidates for the constituencies they cannot win. Tragically, this uniform objection (was this an all- pseudo party line?) does not meet any test of smartness, and passes all tests of stupidity. Indians are supposed to be good at maths but fewer objections are more laughable for their complete misunderstanding of basic tossing the coin probability. All parties nominate women for the 50 per cent of seats they cannot win. Let us examine the case of the lead party — the Congress party. It will lose half of the 542 seats it contests, so will the BJP, and so will all the parties. Doesn’t somebody win? And won’t even the pseudo liberal media highlight the fact that in the name of the women, parties like the Congress and the BJP and the CPM are nominating frivolous women for the Lok Sabha seats?
The recent announcement by the CPM that they will nominate women for 45 per cent of the seats in the forthcoming municipal elections exposes the hollowness of the Bill passed in the Rajya Sabha. The BJP, and even the Congress, please take note. And start hiring some first-year IIT students to dome some simple probability calculations.
If the Congress party politicians stopped at misguided pseudo stuff, it would not be that problematical. What is extremely worrying is the extent the party will go to to rewrite history, and the arrogance with which it wants to obliterate its deeds, evil and otherwise. As already pathetically apparent, the present Congress leadership will go the distance in making people forget that there were any non-Nehru-Gandhi leaders of the Congress party. So forget that Narsimha Rao ever existed, let alone the fact that he alone among the entire Nehru-Gandhi clan initiated policies that have brought India to its present non-poor status. Second, it is appalling that a private Ms Sonia Gandhi vendetta against actor Amitabh Bachchan has to be brought into public space, as was manifested last week when the Congress party politicians were told not to appear in public with the actor, and the Congress party goons brought down posters of Amitabh’s son, Abhishek Bachchan. Why this childish display? Didn’t you know — Amitabh is the Ambassador for Gujarat, and the Gujarat chief minister is Narendra Modi, and Modi is responsible for the anti-Muslim carnage in 2002. It is okay if I make the charge against Modi, or even the Communists. But the Congress party and its embarrassing apologists? The very same party that brought you the Sikh riots of 1984; the very same party that introduced the election list method of identifying and killing innocent people. The very same party that had several ministers in its government of those alleged to have been involved in the 1984 riots. And the very same party that Mr Bachchan campaigned for in 1984 and won a Lok Sabha seat. And they are advising us, Goebellian fashion, to forget the 1984 riots.
Incidentally, the dictionary defines pseudo as a person who makes deceitful pretences.
The author is chairman of Oxus Investments
surjit.bhalla@oxusinvestments.com
