Shikha Mukerjee | Fast-tracked Women’s Quota: Govt in a Hurry Before 2029?

There are low-cost solutions to complicated and very large problems; break up the problem into smaller pieces, and the cost comes down. That seems to be the rough and ready mechanism the BJP under Narendra Modi’s leadership is preparing to deploy to bolster voter support.

If the one-third reservation of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and state Assemblies is indeed fast-tracked and delinked from the full-scale delimitation exercise, it seems the Modi government is in a hurry. At one level, it appears to be a hasty move to find a low-cost solution to manipulating sentiment to improve the BJP’s winnability in the next Lok Sabha elections, due in 2029. If the BJP has sunk to the level of expecting women to be grateful for the opportunity to contest in elections as representatives of the people, and delude themselves into believing they have earned a stake in the distribution of power and the authority to freely use it, it must have urgent reasons for wanting to make this change happen quickly enough to be politically profitable.

If this is the measure of great foresight -- delinking reservation of women’s constituencies from the larger exercise of the Census or decadal head count, the caste census the Modi government announced and the delimitation of all electoral constituencies based on the new Census, not guesstimates of India’s population and its likely distribution -- it has its obvious limitations. The first is about intentions: Is it a signal of good intentions, such as empowering women by giving them greater representation through reserved constituencies? Or, is it a glaring instance of dubious intentions masquerading as well-meaning transformation of India’s electoral politics?

If the reservation of women’s constituencies is indeed being fast-tracked, as media reports indicate, based on unnamed but reliable sources, the question of timing becomes a matter of great consequence. Will the BJP want to waste the advantage that fast-forwarding women’s reservation could give it by bringing it in well before the 2029 Lok Sabha elections? Or, is the BJP’s timeline different? Does it want to take advantage of what it thinks would be the popular perception that women’s reservation is a big enough cause to create a blinding halo around Narendra Modi and his party as champions of “Nari Shakti”?

The Women’s Reservation Act is officially the “Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam 2023”. It is a crafty title designed to create a positive cognitive connection between representation and empowerment. In other words, reserving one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha, state Assemblies and eventually in all elected bodies is therefore is not about moving forward on gender equality but about gender empowerment. This line of thinking is posited on the improbable gullibility of women, who would respond to the optics of reserved constituencies for them with gratitude and loyalty to the man who gave them access to power. It’s a glaring instance of dubious intentions.

Delinking women’s reservation from the larger delimitation exercise is good politics. The parties opposed to the BJP and vehement critics of Mr Modi have long argued that implementing women’s reservation was as easy as pie. Every third seat in the Lok Sabha and the Assemblies could be listed as reserved for women, and then the details of constituencies reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes could be worked out to reflect the one-third principle. The Opposition parties had murmured, not clamoured, for this easy solution to listing constituencies reserved for women ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Numerically higher numbers of women in Parliament and the state Assemblies will not change the way in which political parties operate in elected bodies. Not even in their wildest dreams should elected women imagine they can have independent views, speak on issues independent of the political parties they represent. The popular discourse on representation in India is not about representing the voters of specific constituencies or the people; it is about representing a political party.

It takes more than one election, certainly more than one generation, for real change to begin to manifest itself in the power equations and give women and the gender perspective a greater share in decision-making. Empowerment is a long-drawn process that needs to be worked on every hour of every day for ever. It does not happen by reserving constituencies and getting more women elected, because their role, like that of their male counterparts, will be to toe the line, and follow the party whip.

There appear to be two Indias, living in different spaces at the same time. There is Modi’s India and then there is the rest of India. In Modi’s India, the tragic plane crash in Ahmedabad deserved his immediate personal attention; in the rest of India, of which Manipur is an integral part, the killings, the forced displacements, the violence and enduring crisis do not deserve his personal attention, certainly not a tour of inspection.

Implementing women’s reservation by delinking it from the Census and the larger delimitation of constituencies discourse is also a part of the same problem; there are two Indias; one, that the BJP and the Modi government want to pull closer through lollipops, and the other, that the Modi Sarkar prefers to see through tinted glasses.

The check on the air quality for fast-tracking implementation of women’s representation that was most likely initiated from within the BJP and the Modi government is a clue that a major perception stimulus is required to engage with voters, especially women, grappling with the day-to-day pain of the cost-of-living crisis, the uncertainties of an economy that is sluggish with bad job opportunities and a bleak outlook for the poor, the low- income untenured workforce, women and the annual inflow into the labour market.

The income inequality index, be it the Thomas Piketty-led World Inequality Database or the People Research on India’s Consumer Economy, tells it all: India’s richest 10 per cent citizens’ share of total income was close to 60 per cent, while the bottom 50 per cent were getting only 15 per cent of India’s national income in 2022-2023. Most Indians are not doing well and cannot live as well as they aspire to. Mr Modi may be proud that India has surpassed Japan to become the fourth-largest economy; but most Indians know the difference between how they live and how people in Japan live. India’s per capita income is $2,878 in 2024, whereas Japan’s is $33,955.70. Women know this too, because they handle the problem of paying for food, education, clothes and the violence that is integral to living in poverty.