Tavleen Singh writes: A charade in Parliament

If you understood what the real purpose of last week’s special session of Parliament was, you did better than me. Was it called because of a genuine desire on the part of the Modi government to give women a voice they have not so far had? Or was it a cunning but cynical plot to link women’s reserved seats in Parliament to gerrymandering (delimitation is their euphemism) that seeks to make more seats available to the BJP in states where it dominates the electoral playing field? And why was a special session needed anyway? When you have written a political column for four decades as your columnist has, you develop a healthy suspicion of politicians and the chicanery they use to try and fool all the people all the time. I have no hesitation in admitting that I began to sniff a rat before the session began when I heard the Prime Minister address a large gathering of very elite women in Delhi. It was an adoring female audience that giggled at Modi’s jokes and cheered when he listed the many things his government has done to ‘empower’ women. He told them that he had designed policies that would take care of their needs from the time that they ‘took their first breath to their last.’ Among the things he listed were the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao slogan which he claimed had changed the general attitude to women. He then reminded them that the Mudra Yojana had enabled women, who had never stepped into a bank, to become financially independent. He had ensured further that under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, all homes were registered in the names of the woman of the house. Then there was the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana that gave women access to subsidised cooking gas. The Prime Minister also mentioned the distribution of free sanitary pads in schools, among a long list of other things. At this point let me say that when travelling through the wilds of rural Rajasthan, I have seen remote villages to which there were no roads and been surprised to come upon women using gas to cook. Let me also say here that I have come upon a new species of village official called the ‘pradhan-pati’. Loosely translated this means the headwoman’s husband. Seats have been reserved for women in village councils for many years and sadly, this has mostly resulted in empowering their husbands. Statistics of crimes against women tell the real story of their lives. More than 30,000 women are raped every year. Of these, nearly half of those raped are little girls. Dowry deaths remain so common that it is estimated that 17 women a day are killed for dowry-related reasons. More than 400,000 crimes against women are registered annually and this includes domestic violence. Will this ugly reality change if 33% of the seats in Parliament become reserved for women? No, of course not. What will happen is that more daughters, sisters, wives, widows, and girlfriends will succeed in getting the politically powerful men in their lives to give up a constituency or two for them. Here let me remind you that more than half the women who have already got to Parliament come from political families. Personally, I am against all quotas and have got in trouble before for saying this. I believe that reservations cripple the people who these quotas are given to. Instead of empowering them. Real empowerment comes from giving people the tools to empower themselves and these are better schools, better health services and better infrastructure that would link backward rural areas to cities and towns where jobs are more abundantly available. It is because these things are harder to provide that the tokenism of ‘reservations’ becomes the favourite resort of our political leaders. Speaking of tokenism, it is hard to think of a more cynical example of tokenism than the special session of Parliament that happened last week. It became obvious to most opposition MPs as soon as the debate started that the government was playing them and playing with women’s rights. To link reservation of parliamentary seats for women to the much more complicated, divisive and hard to pass attempt at ‘delimitation’ was to ensure that women can postpone their dream of getting to Parliament. The special session was no more than a clever charade of smoke and mirrors, and it worried me to see that most of my colleagues in the media concentrated not on analysing this but on debating if the bill would pass or not. If the government was sincere about ‘empowering’ women by giving them a voice in Parliament, then this devious linkage to gerrymandering would not have happened. As someone who has often travelled into the wilds of rural India to report on atrocities against women who have been paraded naked in public or punished by rape, I find it hard to believe the solution lies in reserved parliamentary seats. Indian women need a justice system that can be relied on to punish their rapists and torturers without waiting decades for justice. They need schools in which their daughters can study safely. They need financial empowerment through proper jobs so that they do not need to make do with paltry sums handed to them in exchange for their votes every time elections come around. What they do not need are games of smoke and mirrors in parliament.