Women’s reservation

It is now clear that the Congress will not be able to push through the Women’s Reservation Bill in the Lok Sabha as the Yadav Trinity (Mulayam Singh, Laloo and Sharad) has whipped out the Muslim card (Women’s bill comes up against the Purdah, March 12). The Congress cannot afford to lose the Muslim vote in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh and hence the bill is truly stuck.

There is a way, though, that it can salvage the bill – and create a better piece of legislation than the one that was passed in the Rajya Sabha. And that is to make it legally binding on political parties to ensure that one-third of their candidates are women. This suggestion has been made by various academics earlier, but as it stands, it is not fool-proof. For a political party can get around it by simply inflating the number of seats it contests and then allotting unwinnable seats to women.

NewsMonk is happy to suggest a solution to this problem: Not only do political parties have to ensure that one-third of their candidates are women, they also have to ensure that one-third of the constituencies that they represent today are allocated to women.

There are many reasons why this is a better option than the current bill. For example, the biggest problem with the current bill is the principle of rotation – in every election, one-third of the seats selected through a lottery system are reserved for women. These seats become unreserved in the next election, when another set of one-third seats are again selected through a lottery system and reserved for women.

What this means is that in every election, one-third of the seats will be newly reserved and another one-third seats will be newly de-reserved, leading to a situation where a majority of existing representatives know for sure that they will not be re-elected in the next election. This cuts at at the root of representative democracy by taking away any incentive for a majority of representatives to serve their constituency well. It also introduces a high-degree of uncertainty and volatility into the system, through the lottery process.

The new mechanism depends on no lottery and involves no rotation. Therefore, it takes away the arbitrariness and preserves the representative character of the system, while ensuring that women get a fair representation.

The Yadav Trinity has already said that they are open to reservations for women that are implemented through parties, so that is a commitment that can be built upon.

The trouble is, even though this solution will achieve the objective of women’s representation, it will lessen its political attractiveness to the Congress. Leaving the selection of constituencies from where women are fielded open to the political parties will allow them more elbow room. This would make it easier for those parties who are in a strong position to protect their turf, while making it more difficult for weaker parties such as the Congress (in Bihar and UP) to make gains. But what option does the Congress have, other than putting the bill in cold storage?