Every year, India’s policy makers and corporate HR and marketing chiefs appear to rediscover women on March 8, International Women’s Day. For opportunistic MPs, the event is considered a useful reminder to revive the long-standing and -opposed Bill to reserve 33 per cent of the seats in the lower House of Parliament. For India Inc, it’s an opportunity to launch products and services that are ostensibly targeted at women. Sundry awards for women employees and entrepreneurs are also par for the course. Both responses may be well-intentioned, but do little to further the cause of Indian women and gender equality.
Much of what India Inc does in the run-up to Women's Day can be dismissed as ill-judged tokenism and opportunism (it’s clubbed with Valentine’s Day and so on as a good chance to display marketing/CSR/HR skills). But the annual revival of the proposal for Parliamentary reservation for women should have all gender equality advocates worried. Like all bad ideas, the broad thinking behind the move sounds deceptively simple. Indian women make up half the population but their representation in Parliament is poor — there are just 49 women MPs in a house of 545, and this is a record. Reserving seats for women, the reasoning goes, would bring women’s issues to the forefront of policy-making concerns.
The first flaw in the argument is that having more women in positions of power cannot be considered an automatic guarantor of their rights. Consider the fact that since the 1970s almost every South Asian country, bar Nepal and Bhutan, has been led by women at some stage and for reasonably long periods. Juxtapose this fact beside South Asia's gender record and the tenuous link between power structures and gender equality becomes obvious. Indira Gandhi presided over India’s for 15 years in two stints without making a notable mark on the gender question. The country’s male-female ratio was as much a cause of embarrassment then as it is now, and anti-dowry laws, to name just one example, preceded her and were tightened only in the 1980s. India now has its first woman President in Pratibha Patil and yet it is not clear how that has improved the status of women. Indeed, a more damning example would be Ms Mayawati, first dalit woman chief minister.
Experiments in reserving seats for women in Panchayati elections have also yielded inconclusive results. In too many cases, elected women have turned out to be proxies for husbands or other menfolk, which defeats the purpose of the law. It is also contradictory that women like Sushma Swaraj and Vasundhara Raje should be such vociferous supporters of a proposal to reserve one-third of party seats for women in the Bharatiya Janata Party. It cannot be denied that BJP's current crop of women leaders have achieved their positions not by virtue of their gender but their abilities. Likewise for CPI (M)’s Brinda Karat, the Poliburo’s only woman member, and a strong advocate of women's rights. Yet the shaky logic of their pro-reservation stance does not appear to have occurred to any of these women.
Parliament, like corporate boards, is a forum that demands ability and talent. Stocking it with people chosen solely for their gender is unlikely to enhance their status — on the contrary, just as with caste reservations, it is likely to harden social attitudes. All in all, the multi-party support to the women’s reservation Bill seeks to address a critical problem in Indian society with an initiative that makes up in hype what it lacks in substance. If Ms Karat and Ms Swaraj are serious about furthering the cause of gender equality, they would do better to push for faster economic reform. The sheer talent requirements of a rapidly expanding economy will precipitate a more enduring gender reform than any amount of reservation can achieve. Nothing illustrates this better than India’s IT industry, the engine of its global growth, where more than a third of the employees are women. In the end, as global history has shown, liberalisation can be a great liberaliser.
