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Chapter 4 Challenging Political Marginalization: The Women’s Reservation Bill
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4 Challenging Political Marginalization: The Women’s Reservation Bill In the closing days of the Constituent Assembly, delegate Rohini Kumar Chaudhuri proposed a provision to the constitution that would ensure “protection from women,” arguing that this was necessary because “in every sphere of life they [women] are now trying to elbow us out. In the offices, in the legislatures, in the embassies, in everything they try to elbow us out. . . . If the feelings of man are such that he should push them forward I would very much regret it. . . . It is the foolish man who wishes to give them votes and send them to the legislatures and thus create troubles like the trouble which they have created in the matter of the Hindu code.” Although the Assembly rejected his provision, Chaudhuri’s comments point to the vulnerability of masculinist power under the terms and conditions of the postcolonial social contract: Women’s access to the public sphere potentially gave them the power to challenge their legal subordination within the family. Indeed, anxiety over fraternal maintenance of power resurfaced again in the final session of the Constituent Assembly, when delegate B. Das noted that “women are about 50 percent of the population,” adding, “I do not want that they should give battle at the time of the next elections on this ground. I do not want a pitched battle between Man and Woman.” Assembly speaker and future president of India Rajendra Prasad reassured Das that this would not happen, remarking, “we could not compel any electorate to send in women.”1 Far from forcing the electorate to choose women candidates, the Congress listed only eighteen women as contestants in the 1952 elections.2 Madhu Kishwar and others note that, after independence, “women were pushed out of leadership positions to function on the margins, at best 78 decolonizing democracy relegated to the domain of social work at the local level.”3 Despite constitutional measures guaranteeing women the fundamental right of access and equality in the public sphere, women were severely underrepresented in India’s legislative bodies after independence. With women’s formal political equality a stark contradiction to the blatantly discriminatory personal laws, their political marginalization in the new Indian polity served in part to submerge the contradictions of the postcolonial social contract. Indian feminist groups and others, however, have consistently resisted this marginalization. This chapter examines the debate over one such effort to combat women’s political marginalization, the Women’s Reservation Bill. Passed by the Rajya Sabha in 2010, after fourteen years of rancorous parliamentary debate, this bill would amend the constitution to mandate 33 percent representation for women in the Indian parliament.4 reservations for women: calling the question On December 9, 1996, fifty years after the Constituent Assembly met for the first time, Geeta Mukherjee urged her fellow legislators to pass legislation providing for the allotment of 33 percent of the seats in Parliament for women. “Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the first sitting of the Constituent Assembly,” she explained. “This is one of the subjects which we could take up in honor of this occasion. . . . I join all my friends in demanding that the bill be passed without delay.”5 The Women’s Reservation Bill, as the legislation became known, followed on the heels of similar legislation, passed in 1993, that established 33 percent representation for women in the villagelevel legislative bodies (panchayats).6 The subject of fierce and sometimes violent debate, the bill was proposed for consideration several times between its first introduction in 1996 and its passage by the Rajya Sabha in 2010.7 The issue of reserving a certain percentage of parliamentary seats for women was hotly debated even before independence. One milestone in long struggle toward this end came with the publication, in 1974, of the groundbreaking government report Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India. The Indian Ministry of Education and Social Welfare commissioned this report to investigate the status of women after independence, in anticipation of the United Nations’ International Women’s Year in 1975. Led by Dr. Phulrenu Guha, a veteran of the freedom struggle, the ten-member committee of women activists, academics, and politicians toured the country and interviewed more than five hundred women in each Indian state.8 [18.118.12.101] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:44 GMT) the women’s reservation bill 79 Towards Equality found that despite the constitution’s guarantees of gender equality, “there has been...