Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Women reservation: my views

Dramatic scenes were produced by the honourable members of the upper house of Indian polity. The chairman had to ask 50 odd Marshall's to forcefully escort the belligerent "socialist" MPs from the Rajya Sabha. Some days back i saw the same scene (in Rome series) in which Octavian Ceasar asked his soldiers to forcefully pass few bills in Roman senate. The world has not moved a bit in these 2000 years. What these MPs did was shameful but what Marshalls were asked to do was more shameful. Unfortunately there were not many options for Mr. Chairman after having witnessed the brutal attack on 8th March 2010. Well, in these attacks and Marshall we are missing the whole point of reservation.
I totally agree with Yadavs when they say that this bill will deprive Muslims some say in our polity. Right now Muslim MPs are tiny tiny minority in MPs and by reserving 33% seats the Muslim men's chances of electing into assemblies will be reduced by 33%. Thats very true we do not have enough literacy among Muslim women and i strongly feel that Muslim women should be given some reservation within this quota (give them 6% reservation out of 33%, roughly in proportion to their share in population). This will help them a lot and will also help Muslim society in coming out from the humble state and will play a major role in implementing a uniform civil code in this country. But our constitution is vehemently against any reservation on the basis of religion so there goes my point as well as theirs.

Indian governments (past and present) have not done any effort to do an unambiguous and comprehensive socio-economic analysis of all the sections of Indian society. All the existing reports (Mandal, etc ) give conflicting data about % proportion of various sections of our society. Unless that is done,no one can justify reservation be it for SCs/STs/OBCs or for women. Still i am happy that in fiercely patriarchal Indian society, Indian women now can get some thing, can make laws and can rule the country and can help in reducing or eliminating the female infanticide incidents (although Yadavs will wage their final battle in the lower house). The battle in Lok Sabha will be the mother of all battles.

3 comments:

Manu said...

Forget the Yadavs. The way I see it is that the Indian parliament thought that women can't get forward in Indian politics without the reservation. The other thing that I am not sure about is how this thing is going to be implemented ? Will there be some consituencies wherein only women compete with other women for the seats? Or men are allowed to compete but not win? :| this is going to be a logistical nightmare!
And yes, the thing with the marshals was awful!

Neeraj Jadaun said...

@Manu
Indian MPs only know reservation as the only option to bring equality. I hate reservation but we have to live with that.
About this bill i have read that only women will compete the seats reserved for women. Men will not be allowed to contest on that seat. Normal procedure just like SC/STs reservation.

aviral said...

@Manu
A similar setup already exists for scheduled castes, so this not something new that government will have to deal with. Its just that a normal extension to it.

As far as I know, seats on which the reservation is to be implemented will themselves be rotating per election.

Something like

Election year 20xx:
Seat A: Reserved
Seat B-Z: Unreserved

Election year 20xy
Seat A: Unreserved
Seat B: Reserved
Seat C-Z: Unreserved