Reservation to any marginalized group be it Scheduled castes, Scheduled tribes, religious minorities or women, has always hung like an albatross in government’s neck. Instead of becoming a tool to empower, reservation has turned into a political farce. In order to bring about equality it is important not to establish equality of status but to provide ‘equality of opportunity’.
This is true in case of women reservations too. In place of offering 33% reservation to women in legislature, it should become mandatory for the political parties to give 50% of election tickets to women and reserve a percentage of party posts for them. The Election Commission can play a major role to maintain this inner party democracy and to make political parties more representative. This step if taken will help women to reach power positions on the basis of their merit rather than merely on the basis of reservation.
The UN has stated Gender equality and women empowerment as one of its Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015. Adequate representation of women in politics is one of the important steps in this direction and there are many plausible reasons to believe so.
First, the State as an extension of society has since time immemorial ensured the organization of power relations on a gender basis. Men are naturally associated with leadership and women are accepted as leaders if they accept masculine notions of power. Moreover the state has formalized and institutionalized these power relations by retaining male domination at the level of top personnel within states. The state and the entire society systematically favour men in defining of job merit. A man’s physiology defines most sports; their socially defined biographies define workplace expectations and successful career patterns; their objectification of life defines art; their military service defines citizenship; their presence defines family; their wars and ruler ship defines history; their image defines God. This structure which is based on men’s interests and values can only be transformed when women will come to acquire power positions. The “spillover effect”, gradually and eventually, will flow from top to bottom. The promotions of ten women IAS officers done by Mayawati immediately after becoming the CM of UP exemplifies the role of powerful women in altering the customary structure.
Second, women were kept out of many kinds of work and this resulted in the belief that the work is unsuited to them because when a group is kept out of something for long enough, it is most overwhelmingly likely that the activities of that sort will develop in a way unsuited to the excluded group. The palpable example is the incompatibility of most work with bearing and nurturing of children. If women had been fully involved in running the society from the start, they would have undeniably found a way of arranging the work and child rearing to fit each other. Thus to ensure equality between sexes in true sense women should initiate, lay and ascertain their own distinct social structure, which will happen only when women take to power and authority in the political sphere.
Third, the ideologies and values of men as a dominant class are so deeply internalized by women as a subjugated class that such customs and beliefs have inadvertently become a part of their “unquestioned common sense” to a large extent. In order to stir their consciousness and bring about a revolution in the established structure, our society desperately needs women as power holders.
Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati, Sheila Dixit, Vasundhara Raje, Renuka Chowdhary have already made their mark as powerful women. Reservation for women in political parties can thus prove to be a welcome development both for the women and the society at large. Because all said and done society and state tread the path of progress when women, constituting half the population, participate fully, effectively and effeminately in all spheres– economic, social and most importantly the political sphere.
