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Manusmṛti
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Manusmṛti (Sanskrit: मनुस्मृति), also known as Mānava-Dharmaśāstra (Sanskrit: मानवधर्मशास्त्र), is the most important and earliest metrical work of the Dharmaśāstra textual tradition of Hinduism.[1] Generally known in English as the Laws of Manu, it was first translated into English in 1794 by Sir William Jones, an English Orientalist and judge of the British Supreme Court of Judicature in Calcutta.[2] The text presents itself as a discourse given by the sage called Manu to a group of seers, or rishis, who beseech him to tell them the "law of all the social classes" (1.2). Manu became the standard point of reference for all future Dharmaśāstras that followed it. [3]
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Sources and Authority
The Manu Smriti was written as the words of the original creator, the "Imperishable One," or "Brahmā". [4] By attributing the words to supernatural forces, the text takes on an authoritative tone as a statement on Dharma, in opposition to previous texts in the field, which were more scholarly. [5] A content analysis, however, shows the obvious influence of previous Dharmasutras and Arthasastric work. In particular, the Manu Smriti was the first to adopt the term vyavaharapadas. These eighteen Titles of Law or Grounds for Litigation make up more than one fifth of the work and deal primarily with matters of the king, state, and judicial procedure. [6]
[edit] Author
Western scholars imagine another author of this sacred text, who used the eponym "Manu" in order to invoke association with the first human being and also the first king in Indian tradition. Though most scholars had previously considered the text a composite put together over a long period of time, Olivelle has recently argued that the complex and consistent structure of the text suggests a single author. However, no details of this eponymous author's life are known, though it is likely that he belonged to a conservative Brahmin caste somewhere in Northern India.[7]
[edit] Dating and Historical Context
A range of historical opinion generally dates composition of the text any time between 200 BCE and 200 CE.[8] After the breakdown of the Maurya and Shunga empires, there was a period of uncertainty that led to renewed interest in traditional social norms.[9] In Thapar's view, "The severity of the Dharma-shastras was doubtless a commentary arising from the insecurity of the orthodox in an age of flux."[10]
The dharma class of texts were also noteworthy because they did not depend on the authority of particular Vedic schools, becoming the starting point of an independent tradition that emphasized dharma itself and not its Vedic origins.[11]
[edit] Structure of the Text
The original treatise consisted of one thousand chapters of law, polity, and pleasure given by Brahmā. His son, Manu, learns these lessons and proceeds to teach his own students, including Bhrigu. Bhrigu then relays this information in the Manu Smriti, to an audience of his own pupils. [12]
This original narrative was subdivided later into twelve chapters. There is debate over the effects of this division on the underlying, holistic manner in which the original treatise was written. [13] The book is written in simple verse as opposed to the metrical verse of the preceding dharmasutras. Manu also introduced a unique "transitional verse" which segued the end of one subject and the beginning of the next.
The treatise is written with a frame story, in which a dialogue takes place between Manu's disciple, Bhrigu, and an audience of his own students. The story begins with Manu himself detailing the creation of the world and the society within it, structured around four social classes. Bhrigu takes over for the remainder of the work, teaching the details of the rest of Manu's teachings. The audience reappears twice more, asking first to ask about how Brahmins can be subjected to death, and second to ask the effects of action. [14]
[edit] Table of Contents
This Table of Contents comes from Olivelle's translation of the Manu Smriti and provides the transitional verses between each subject: [15]
[edit] 1. Origin of the World (1.1-119)
[edit] 2. Sources of the Law (2.1-24)
"I have described to you above succinctly the source of the Law, as also the origin of this whole world. Learn now the Laws of the social classes." (2.25)
[edit] 3. Dharma of the Four Social Classes (2.25-11.266)
- 3.1 Rules Relating to Law (2.25-10.131)
- 3.1.1 Rules of Action in Normal Times (2.26-9.336)
- 3.1.1.1 Fourfold Dharma of a Brahmin (2.26-6.97)
"I have explained to you above the fourfold Law of Brahmins, a Law that is holy and brings imperishable rewards after death. Listen now to the Law of kings." (6.97)
- 3.1.1.2 Rules of Action for a King (7.1-9.325)
"I have described above in its entirety the eternal rules of action for the king. What follows, one should understand, are the rules of action for the Vaiśyas and Śūdras in their proper order." (9.325)
- 3.1.1.3 Rules of Action for Vaiśyas and Śūdras (9.325-36)
"I have described above the splendid rules of action for the social classes outside times of adversity. Listen now to the rules for them in the proper order for times of adversity." (9.336)
- 3.1.2 Rules of Action in Times of Adversity (10.1-129)
"I have described above the entire set of rules pertaining to the Law of the four classes. Next, I will explain the splendid rules pertaining to penance." (10.131)
- 3.2 Rules Relating to Penance (11.1-265)
"You have described this Law for the four classes in its entirety, O Sinless One! Teach us accurately the ultimate consummation of the fruits of actions." (12.1)
[edit] 4. Determination Regarding Engagement in Action (12.3-116)
"Bhrgu, the son of Manu and the very embodiment of the Law, said to those great seers: 'Listen to the determination with respect to engagement in action.'" (12.2)
- 4.1 Fruits of Action (12.3-81)
"I have declared to you above all the fruits arising from actions. Listen now to these rules of action for a Brahmin, rules that secure the supreme good." (12.82)
- 4.2 Rules of Action for Supreme God (12.83-115)
"I have explained to you above all the best means of securing the supreme good. A Brahmin who does not deviate from them obtains the highest state." (12.116)
[edit] Nature and Purpose
The Manu Smriti is written with a focus on the "shoulds" of dharma rather than on the actuality of everyday practice in India at the time. Still, its practical application should not be underestimated. Through intermediate forces such as the instruction of scholars, the teachings did indeed have indirect effect on major segments of the Indian population. It is also an invaluable point of common reference in scholarly debates. [16]
It seems likely that the book was written in a manner which was very mindful to the dangers facing the Brahmin community during a time of much change and social upheaval. A renewed alliance between the Brahmin and Kṣatra communities is clearly a goal reflected in the introduction of the vyavahārapadas. [17] The emphasis which this topic receives can be seen as an offering of solidarity from the religious community to the ruling class.
[edit] Commentaries on Manu
There have been numerous commentaries written on the Manu Smṛti. Some of the major commentaries are listed below:
[edit] Bhāruci
Bhāruci is the oldest known commentator on the Manu Smṛti. Kane places him in the late 10th or early 11 century,[18] Olivelle places him in the 8th century, [19] and Derrett places him between 600-650 CE[20]. From these three opinions we can place Bhāruci anywhere from the early seventh century CE to the early eleventh century CE. The surviving portion of Bhāruci's commentary that we have today deals mostly with the duties of the king and whether or not the king can be a source of dharma.
[edit] Medhātithi
Medhātithi is one of the most famous commentators on the Manu Smṛti, and there is some debate regarding the location in which he was writing, but scholars such as Buhler, Kane, and Lingat tend to believe he was from Kashmir or the area around Kashmir. The exact date that Medhātithi was writing is also unclear, and he has been placed anywhere between 820CE and 1050CE.[21]
[edit] Views and criticism
The work is considered an important source for sociological, political and historical studies. Manu Smriti is one of the most heavily criticized of the scriptures of Hinduism, having been attacked by colonial scholars, modern liberals, Hindu reformists, Dalit advocates, feminists[22] , Marxists and certain groups of traditional Hindus, namely Smartas. Much of its criticism stems from its unknown authority, as some believe the text to be authoritative, but others do not. There is also debate over whether the text has suffered from later interpolations of verses.
In northern/southern India Vaishnavism and Shaivism were the common religious traditions, and the teachings of the Manu Smriti was not as widely followed or well-known.
In 300 BCE, Megasthenes wrote that the people around the Mathura region worshipped Harculas (Hari-Krishna) and followed the Gita as daily life principles. Also Faxian did not mention anything about rigid-ness of the varna systems. Chanakya, the author of Arthashastra, never mentioned any social laws prevailing in the society during the first integrator and Mauryan Emperor Chandragupta's reign.
The Manu Smriti was one of the first Sanskrit texts studied by the British. It was first translated into English by the founder of indology, Sir William Jones. His version was published in 1794.[23] British administrative requirements encouraged their interest in the Dharmashastras, which they believed to be legal codes. In fact, these were not codes of law but norms related to social obligations and ritual requirements.[24] According to Avari:
The text was never universally followed or acclaimed by the vast majority of Indians in their history; it came to the world's attention through a late eighteenth-century translation by Sir William Jones, who mistakenly exaggerated both its antiquity and its importance. Today many of its ideas are popularised as the golden norm of classical Hindu law by Hindu universalists. They are, however, anathema to modern thinkers and particularly feminists.[25]
The "Law of Manu" was cited favorably by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who deemed it "an incomparably spiritual and superior work" to the Christian Bible. He observed that "the sun shines on the whole book" and attributed its ethical perspective to "the noble classes, the philosophers and warriors, [who] stand above the mass."[26] However, he also criticized it for its abusive treatment of the chandala, claiming that "this organization too found it necessary to be terrible."[27]
Surendra Kumar, who counts a total of 2,685 verses, finds that only 1,214 are authentic, the other 1,471 being interpolations on the text.[28] In reply to the criticism of the sudra caste, the verses critical of the sudras and women are considered to be later interpolations, but not later than Adi Shankara (7th-8th century CE). The law in Manu Smriti also appears to be overtly positive towards the brahmin (priest) caste in terms of concessions made in fines and punishments. The stance of the Manu Smriti about women has also been debated. While certain verses such as (III - 55, 56, 57, 59, 62) glorify the position of women, other verses (IX - 3, 17) seem to attack the position and freedom women have. The education of women is also discussed in the text. Certain interpretations of Verse (IX - 18) claim that it discourages women from reading Vedic scriptures. Verse (II - 240), however, allows women to read Vedic scriptures. Similar contradictory phrases are encountered in relation to child marriage in verses (IX - 94) and (IX - 90).
In his book Revolution and Counter-Revolution in India, Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar asserted that Manu Smriti was written by a sage named Brigu during the times of Pushyamitra of Sangha in connection with social pressures caused by the rise of Buddhism. [29] However, historian Romila Thapar considers these claims to be exaggerations. She writes that archaeological evidence casts doubt on the claims of Buddhist persecution by Pushyamitra.[30] Support of the Buddhist faith by the Sungas at some point is suggested by an epigraph on the gateway of Bharhut, which mentions its erection "during the supremacy of the Sungas"[31] Hinduism does not evangelize.[32]
However, not all Hindus agree with the criticisms of the text, or the assertion that the Manu Smriti is not authoritative. Some prominent Hindu figures, such as Swami Dayananda Saraswati[33] and A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami[34], hold the text to be authentic and authoritative. Other admirers of the text have included Annie Besant, P.D. Ouspensky, Pandurang Shastri Athavale and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Friedrich Nietzsche is noted to have said "Close the Bible and open the Manu Smriti. "It has an affirmation of life, a triumphing agreeable sensation in life and that to draw up a lawbook such as Manu means to permit oneself to get the upper hand, to become perfection, to be ambitious of the highest art of living" [35]
[edit] Notes
- ^ See Flood 1996: 56 and Olivelle 2005.
- ^ Jones's translation is available online as The Institutes of Hindu Law: Or, The Ordinances of Manu, Calcutta: Sewell & Debrett, 1796.
- ^ Olivelle, "Literary History," p. 16.
- ^ Olivelle(2004), p. xx.
- ^ Olivelle, Literary History, p. 17.
- ^ Olivelle, Literary History, p. 17.
- ^ Olivelle, "Literary History," p. 16.
- ^ For composition between 200 BCE and 200 CE see: Avari, p. 142. For dating of composition "between the second century BCE and third century CE" see: Flood (1996), p. 56. For dating of Manu Smriti in "final form" to the second century CE, see: Keay, p. 103. For dating as completed some time between 200 BCE and 100 CE see: Hopkins, p. 74. For probable origination during the second or third centuries AD, see: Kulke and Rothermund, p. 85. For the text as preserved dated to around the 1st century BCE. see: Encyclopedia Britannica Concise, http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/article-9371223/Manu-smrti, retrieved 2007-06-24
- ^ For significance of post-empire social uncertainty as a factor in the development of the Code of Manas, see: Kulke and Rothermund, p. 85.
- ^ Tharpar (2002), p. 279.
- ^ For the dharmashastras, including Manu Smriti, as the starting point for an independent tradition not dependent on Vedic origins, see: Hopkins, p. 74.
- ^ Olivelle(2004), pp. xxi-xxii.
- ^ Olivelle(2004), pp. xxvii.
- ^ Olivelle(2004), p. xxv.
- ^ Olivelle(2004), pp. xxviii-xxix.
- ^ Olivelle(2004), p. xxli.
- ^ Olivelle, Literary History, p. 19.
- ^ Kane, P. V., History of Dharmaśāstra, (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1975), Volume I, Part I, 566.
- ^ Olivelle, Patrick, "Dharmaśāstra: A Literary History", 29.
- ^ Olivelle, Patrick, "Dharmaśāstra: A Literary History", 29.
- ^ Kane, P. V., History of Dharmaśāstra, (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1975), Volume I, Part II, 583.
- ^ For objections to the work by feminists, see: Avari, pp. 142-143.
- ^ For Manu Smriti as one of the first Sanskrit texts noted by the British and translation by Sir William Jones in 1794, see: Flood (1996), p. 56.
- ^ For British interest in Dharmashastras due to administrative needs, and their misinterpretation of them as legal codes rather than as social and ritual texts, see: Thapar (2002), pp. 2-3.
- ^ Avari, p. 142.
- ^ Friedrich Nietzche, The Antichrist (1888), 56-57.
- ^ Friedrich Nietzche, Twilight of the Idols (1888).
- ^ Surendra Kumar, Vishuddha Manusmriti, (Arsh Sahitya Prachar Trust, Delhi, Fourth Edition), p. 5.
- ^ Revolution and Counter-Revolution in India
- ^ Romila Thapar, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Oxford University Press (1960) p. 200.
- ^ John Marshall, "An Historical and Artistic Description of Sanchi", from A Guide to Sanchi, citing p. 11. Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing (1918). Pp. 7-29 on line, Project South Asia.
- ^ K. V. Rao, Socialism, Secularism, and Democracy in India, pp. 28-30. Nagendra K. Singh, Enforcement of Human Rights in Peace and War and the Future of Humanity, p. 35. Martinus Nijhoff (1986) ISBN 9024733022
- ^ The Light of Truth, Chapter 4
- ^ Bhagavad Gita As It Is, Chapter 16 Text 7 - "...Even up to today, those who are Hindu follow the Manu-samhita..."
- ^ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, vol. 1.
[edit] References
- Flood, Gavin (1996). An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43878-0.
- Hopkins, Thomas J. (1971). The Hindu Religious Tradition. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
- Keay, John (2000). India: A History. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3797-0.
- Kulke, Hermann; Rothermund, Dietmar (1986). A History of India. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 0-88029-577-5.
- Olivelle, Patrick (2005). Manu's Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-195-17146-2.
- Thapar, Romila (2002). Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-24225-4.
- Translation by G. Bühler (1886). Sacred Books of the East: The Laws of Manus (Vol. XXV). Oxford. Available online as The Laws of Manu
"The Laws of Manu". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/The_Laws_of_Manu. - Olivelle, Patrick (2004). The Law Code of Manu. New York: OUP. ISBN 0192802712.
- Olivelle, Patrick. "Dharmasastra: A Literary History"
| MULNIVASI MAHILA SANGH WOMEN RESERVATION BILL (WRB) QUESTIONAIRE |
|---|
Full Name & Address, Phone number : ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Occupation :---------------------------Name of institution (if working) & Designation : ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Constitutional Identity : SC/ST/OBC/Minority/Others
- Do you have any information regarding the Women Reservation Bill (WRB) (Legislative)? Yes/No
- In the parliament and legislatures do you think that 33% reservation for women is adequate? Yes/No
- Are you of the opinion that for adequate representation in Parliament and Legislature 50% reservation for women is required? Yes/No
- Do women in India get equal opportunity in every sphere of life and development? Yes/No
- Do you think that by passing the Women Reservation Bill, all women
in this country will get equal opportunity in all the spheres of development? Yes/No
- Are you aware that WRB does not give representation to the Mulnivasi women (SC/ST/OBC/Minorities)? Yes/No
- What is the total population percentage of women in India? Yes/No
50% (50 crore) 33% (33 crore) 20% (20 crore)
- What is the percentage of population of Mulnivasi women in India out of the total women population in India? Yes/No
85% (43 crore) 33% (20 crore) 20% (15 crore)
- If Women constitute 50% of the population should not women be given 50% representation in the Parliament & Legislature? Yes/No
- If Mulnivasi women constitute 85% of the total women population, should not 85% of seats be represented by Mulnivasi women? Yes/No
- Should women participate in the decision making process of this country? Yes/No
- The motive behind getting the WRB passed is to increase the participation of women in decision making process of the country? Yes/No
- The real motive behind the WRB is to decrease the representation of SC/ST/OBC and increase the representation of upper castes in the Parliament and Legislature by gaining the sympathy of women? Yes/No
- Are you aware that there is no provision for the representation of SC/ST/OBC women in the 33% seats? Yes/No
- Is anybody (social organization/political party) opposing the bill for the reason that there is no representation given to SC/ST/OBC women? Yes/No
- According to the Panchayat Raj Act is there provision for representation of SC/ST/OBC women in the Panchayat? Yes/No
- Are you of the confirmed opinion that the women elected in Panchayat are able to participate in the decision making process? Yes/No
- Do you agree that women elected in panchayats due to there educational backwardness and traditional gender discrimination are mere rubber stamp representatives Yes/No
- Are you aware that SC/ST/OBC women elected in Panchayat as Sarpanch etc., have faced atrocities like removal from service, indictment in false cases, rape, public humiliation? Yes/No
- Do you consider that mere representation of women in the legislature and Parliament will remove all the prejudices and injustices against women? Yes/No
- If the Bill is passed, will it lead to overall development of all women in this country? Yes/No
- Don't you think that if the Bill is passed in current shape (without giving representation to SC/ST/OBC/Minorities women) only the upper caste Women will benefit from the 33% reservation? Yes/No
- Should all the women in the country be made aware about the WRB? Yes/No
- Are mass awareness programmes necessary to create an awareness regarding the Bill and its implications? Yes/No
- Is a national level organization of mulnivasi women necessary to implement the principles of equal opportunity in practice and enhance the participation of women in decision making processes of the country? Yes/No
- Do you think that more important than legislative representation, the Representation of women in education, services (public and private) and Civil services is crucial to overall development of women? Yes/No
- The employed women should bear in mind that they are in service as the representation of the society from where they come and that it is then responsibility to pay back to the society? Yes/No
Posted on September 07, 2008
Karat also said that the 50 percent reservation for women in village governing bodies, Panchayats should be implemented at national level.
Congress party leader Girja Vyas said the women's reservation bill is on top of the Congress led government's agenda.
"The manifestos of many political parties talk about women empowerment. Especially the Congress Party has it in their manifesto. It is in the 100 days agenda of the party so it has to be fulfilled," Vyas said.
Amar Singh, general secretary of regional Samajwadi Party, however, echoed the sentiments of his party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav.
Yadav had said that his party would not be able to support the bill in its present structure.
"With the present structure of the bill, we will not be able to support it. The government may still pass it because they have the required number. But we will not support it. The careers of many establish leaders will be destroyed as their seats can be lost due to women reservation," Singh said.
PTI
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New Delhi: The much-touted Bill to provide 33% quota to women for seats in Parliament and state assemblies is unlikely to be passed during the term of the present Lok Sabha which comes to an end in a few months.
This became clear with the Parliamentary Standing Committee getting the third extension to complete its task of scrutinising the Women's Reservation Bill.
The Committee headed by senior Congress MP E M Sudarshana Natchiappan has been given the latest extension till the end of the next session of Parliament which is likely to commence sometime in February.
The Committee, to which the Bill was referred in May last year, got two extensions -- the last being till the end of the monsoon session of Parliament which went on till 23 December.
"Rajya Sabha Chairman has granted further extension to the Committee till the end of the next session of Parliament for presentation of report on the Bill," the Rajya Sabha Secretariat said.
The passage of the Bill involves certain technicalities as it is a Constitution amendment Bill.
Besides the requirement of Parliament passing the Constitutional amendment Bill with two-third majority, the measure would have to go to state legislatures as at least 50% of the state legislatures are needed to ratify it.
Keen on securing a consensus on the Bill, Natchiappan said the Committee would visit some more states to hold wider consultations with political parties on the issue.
"The government wants to see that a consensus is arrived at so that the Bill is passed in Parliament and for that we are working," Natchiappan said.
The Bill has remained stalled due to the insistence by some parties on a "quota within quota" and the Committee was hopeful of arriving at a consensus on the issue which has been eluding for over a decade.
To break the deadlock over the contentious Bill in its present form, which was opposed by the some parties like Samajwadi Party, the Committee has suggested that it should be left to the state legislatures to propose adequate representation in assembly and Lok Sabha for women and OBCs.
The reason behind the "compromise formula" was that state legislatures are better placed to decide the extent of representation in elected posts for women and OBCs.
Samajwadi Party, the ally of the ruling UPA coalition at the Centre, had made it clear that it was against any haste on the measure.
However, the main opposition BJP said it would support the Bill in its present form and asked the UPA government to clear it.
RJD, another key UPA ally, is also opposed to the Bill in its present form.
Chennai (PTI): Union Home Minister P Chidambaram today expressed confidence that the long-awaited Women's Reservation Bill would be passed by parliament this year.
"...I am confident that by the year end the Women's Reservation Bill will be passed," Mr Chidambaram said after flagging off three women special EMU train services at the Tambaram railway station near here.
The Bill that provides for 33 per cent quota for women in Parliament and state assemblies, has been hanging fire for long due to opposition by some parties, including Mulayam Singh's Samajwadi Party and Lalu Prasad-led Rashtriya Janata Dal.Women bosses more likely to be sexually harassed: Study
WASHINGTON: Women bosses are more likely to face sexual harassment at work than females who are not holding supervisory positions, a study has
Almost half of women supervisors surveyed reported sexual harassment, compared to a third of women not in a top position, said the researchers from the University of Minnesota.
"This study provides the strongest evidence to date supporting the theory that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination," said Heather McLaughlin, sociologist at the University of Minnesota (U-M).
"Male co-workers, clients and supervisors seem to be using harassment as an equalizer against women in power," underlined McLaughlin, the lead researcher of study whose findings will be presented at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, California.
The women were part of a 2003 and 2004 prospective study of adolescents that began in 1988 with a sample of 1,010 ninth graders in the Saint Paul, Min public school district who were checked up on with questions almost every year since the study began. The women were almost 30 years old when they were questioned in 2003 and 2004.
Women's bill a conspiracy to finish regional parties: Lalu
Proposal for 50% quota to women in panchayats deferred!UPA failed to deliver its promise of 33% reservation for women in Parliament and state assemblies within 100 days but it was said to be working to
Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni told mediapersons that the Bill, seeking to amend Article 243 D of the Constitution, did not come up before the Cabinet. She also confirmed that the Bill was not taken up because of the absence of Mr Joshi. Once the Cabinet clears the Bill, it could be introduced in the next session of Parliament, likely in October.
Both the government and the Congress have made it clear that there would be no dilution of the proposed 33% reservation for women in Lok Sabha and in state assemblies.
Over a decade after the exercise started, there is no unanimity on how to go about with the task without antagonising various sections.
A former Union Minister, who has earlier held parleys with opposition parties to reach a consensus on the issue, suggested that a solution can be found if the number of seats in the Lok Sabha, which now has strength of 543, is increased to accommodate women.
"Instead of sharing the existing seats, increasing the number of seats in the Lok Sabha could be a solution. If that is done, the government can even bring the Bill in the Budget session," another member of the Committee said.
The member said this arrangement could take care of the opposition to the Bill in the present form.
Opposition to the measure has come from leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav (SP), Lalu Prasad (RJD) and Sharad Yadav (JD-U), who even went to the extent of saying that he would consume poison in the Lok Sabha if the legislation was passed.
Mulayam Singh Yadav has suggested that the quota be brought down to 20 per cent.
Going against the BJP line, former party MP Vinay Katiyar said if the Bill was passed in the present form, it will affect the unity and integrity of the country and create a "big problem".
Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi is confident of the passage of the Bill. His contention is that the electoral arithmetic of the Congress is itself a big boost. "Additionally we expect several non-Congress, non-UPA parties to support the Congress initiative", he said.
He said that the changed circumstances and the diverse bipartisan support should also act as a reality check for those who are opposing the measure.
However, a section of the Congress wants the leadership to tread with caution on the Bill and not act in haste. If the government went ahead with it without addressing the concerns of those opposing, it could boomerang on the party, they feel.
A former Union Minister said that if the opponents of the bill take to streets and project it as a move to help the upper castes, it could cost the party heavily at a time when the Congress was on the revival path in the North.
The previous Parliamentary Standing committee, which has almost completed its job, is likely to be reconstituted in a week's time and government would await its report.
In the backdrop of strong opposition from some parties, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been maintaining a studied silence and skipped the issue in his reply to the Motion of Thanks to the President's Address in both Houses of Parliament.
Confident of getting the required support for the passage of the measure, Parliamentary Affairs Minister P K Bansal said there will be no dilution in the Bill.
While BJP has made it clear that it was committed to 33% reservation for women and was against any dilution, it, however, left it to the government to adopt "any formula" that satisfied all parties.
President Pratibha Patil had in her address to the joint sitting of Parliament stated that the Bill was one of the priority agenda of the government.
Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, a strong votary of the measure, said "there is a new Parliament, a new atmosphere and fresh efforts are being made for a consensus."
Four states -- Bihar, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh -- already have 50% reservation for women as states have the power to bring in amendments in their state laws to increase women's representation up to 50%.
Rajasthan has also announced 50% reservation that will be implemented in the next panchayat election in early 2010. On Wednesday, Kerala announced 50% reservation for women in panchayats and other local bodies.
Bihar was the first state to give 50% reservation to women in panchayats in 2005. In Uttarakhand, women have an overwhelming 55% representation in panchayats as many of them contested even from non-reserved seats and won. But the state works through the UP Panchayat Act and is yet to have its own law.
The proposal, which seeks to amend Article 243(d) of the Constitution providing for one-third reservation for women in panchayats by enhancing it to 50 per cent, is expected to figure in next week's Cabinet meeting. Government's intention in this regard was outlined by President Pratibha Patil in her address to the joint sitting of Parliament on June four when she said that a constitutional amendment would be brought in to provide 50 per cent quota for women in panchayats and urban local bodies.
Government feels enhancing reservation in panchayats and urban local bodies would lead to more women entering the public sphere and this, in turn, would help address issues like multiple deprivations of class, caste and gender suffered by them. Bihar, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh are among the few states which have already implemented 50 per cent reservation for women in panchayati raj institutions. While Rajasthan has announced that it would implement the proposal in the next panchayat election in 2010, Kerala declared yesterday that it would bring a legislation next month to put it into operation.
"I have always thought about empowerment (of women) in different ways. One always thinks about (women's) reservation Bill but that one is to get political empowerment. I think there are other forms of empowerment such as social and economic empowerment which are equally or much more crucial," Sangama, the youngest minister in the UPA government, said.
Announcing this after a cabinet meeting, chief minister V S Achutanandan, who is heading a CPM-led LDF government, said a special session of the assembly would be convened from September 8 to 17 to bring in the required legislation. "The session will focus only on the legislation," he said.
A liaison committee of LDF partners had last week asked the state government to reserve 50% seats of seats for women in panchayats and local bodies. At present 33% of seats in civic bodies are constitutionally guaranteed for women. The law allows states to make amendments to raise it up to 50%.
Once okayed by the assembly, the law would increase women's representation on administrative panels of civic bodies like standing committees, giving them a decisive say on important matters like budget allocations for welfare schemes.
Greater presence of women on civic bodies would make formulation of schemes, budget allocations far more gender-sensitive. Kerala has 999 village panchayats, 152 block panchayats, 14 district panchayats, 53 municipalities and five corporations. The cabinet also decided to give 12kg rice free to STs. All school children who are eligible under the mid-day meal scheme will also be given 5kg rice free of cost before Onam.
Reeda Sheikh's family demands Ghulam Nabi Azad's resignation
Taking a strong exception to Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad's statement, that Reeda Sheikh was responsible for the entry of swine flu in India, members of her family on Sunday demanded his resignation.
Addressing a news conference here, Reeda's mother Sheireen, said it was her daughter's death that alerted the country about the dangers of swine flu. Reeda Sheikh was the first victim of H1N1 virus in India
Earlier, Azad had said in Delhi that Reeda might have spread the disease to nearly 85 people of her school, as a person could spread the disease to thousands of people. Schools in Pune were closed after the death of 14- year-old Reeda a student of class 9 in St. Anne's School. Reeda's aunt Ayesha questioned how Azad could say that the spread of the virus was minimal, when nearly a lakh people have died of the disease. They also said that no one in the country is expediting measures to control swine flu.
In India, there is continued acceptance of deprivation and gross injustices' while issues like farmland acquisition and losing national
Delivering the Penguin annual lecture, Justice And India', the philosopher economist called for the need to prioritise injustices' in the country, reiterating that the more evil injustice needed to be dealt with first without waiting for all ills to be eradicated.
According to him, undernourishment, lack of education and medical facilities and gender inequality make for far greater injustice than land acquisition, the Indo-US nuclear deal and rising petroleum prices. While acknowledging that the latter too worth debate, he felt they attract far too much public attention while lasting injustices like poverty, hunger and poor delivery of social services do not draw the attention they deserve. "There is urgent need for removal of these terrible deprivations," he said.
Coming down hard on the private medical sector, Sen pointed to the poor functioning of public institutions.
Referring to his just-published book, The Idea of Justice, in which the economist terms attempts to create a perfectly just society' as utopian and transcendental, Sen pointed out that efforts should instead be directed to removing unjust practices. The idea of justice, according to him, is relative.
"Consider the case of three children fighting over a flute. The first one believes he should have the flute as he is the only one who can play it. The second child says she should get the flute as she has nothing else to play with. The third one insists that she should keep the flute as she is the one who made it in the first place. How does one decide who should get the flute? The concept of justice should be based on public reasoning. The key is to avoid gross injustice," he said.
PMO looking into CBI's 'vulgar' language against nun: Brinda Karat
The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has taken serious note of the "vulgar" language used by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to describe a woman accused in the murder of a Kerala nun, said Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader Brinda Karat Saturday.
Karat, who wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Thursday urging that all probe agencies be asked to maintain minimum standards of respect to the dignity of women, said: "I followed up the matter. I spoke to Prithviraj Chavan (Minister of State in the PMO). He told me they are looking into it."
"Usually, the PM doesn't reply as he is very busy with other administrative matters," Karat told IANS.
"The language used in the CBI charge sheet against an accused, Sister Sephy, is obscene, vulgar, unscientific," Karat had said in a letter to the prime minister.
In its charge sheet filed last week in a Kochi court in the 1992 murder case of the Catholic nun, Sister Abhaya, the premier investigation agency said Abhaya had discovered Sister Sephy, an accused, in suspicious circumstances along with two Catholic priests, who are the other accused.
Fearing that Abhaya would reveal the incident to others, the accused hit her with a blunt object and after she fell unconscious threw her into a well in Kottayam. Her body was found later, says the CBI charge sheet.
Fresh talks likely to break logjam over women's quota
There was evidence that those against the bill realise the odds are now against them with Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav saying a 20% quota had been suggested in the past and that an all-party meeting should explore the possibility of a consensus. He also proposed parties should by law be made to field a certain percentage of women nominees.
Even though he vowed to bitterly oppose the bill in its present form, warning of sustained opposition, Mulayam Singh was much more conciliatory than he has been in the past. "Don't use your majority to try and bulldoze this bill. Speak to us so that way can be found for the bill to be passed by concensus," he told leader of House Pranab Mukherjee in Lok Sabha on Monday.
Mulayam Singh referred to past efforts to pass the contentious bill when he said a proposal to scale down the 20% quota from the proposed 33% had almost been agreed on. "I have discussed this with Vajpayee and Advani in the past. At the time Congress opposed the move and the bill was not passed," he said. BJP deputy leader Sushma Swaraj also later told the media that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had made two attempts to break the logjam.
Swaraj said she was saddened to hear the "same language as has been the case in the past" with regard to the bill and demanded that the government spell out a timeframe for passing the legislation. But she also said an all-party meeting could be useful even if it did not reasult in a consensus. Referring to Mulayam Singh's remarks, she said, "He has spoken of 20%...I think it can be more than that, but there is no harm in trying to achieve a consensus."
Though Swaraj did not move away from the BJP line of backing the bill in its present form with 33% reservation for women in legislatures, she indicated that a hassle-free passage for the quota would be preferable to an all out confrontation in the House. "The important thing is for the quota to become a reality. Right now hopes are being built that may not be sustainable," she said.
A senior government minister who has a key role to play in the government's legislative business said the reservations expressed by Mulayam Singh and others could be thrashed out in a parliamentary standing committee. Now that a new Lok Sabha had been elected, the standing committees would be formed afresh and the bill, introduced in Rajya Sabha last year, would be taken up for discussion. "It will then have to be moved as a Constitution amendment bill," the minister said.
He indicated that the process may take some time but the standing committee could try and and evolve a consensus on the bill. "That would be the forum for discussions," he said without commenting on the demand that an all-party meeting be convened. The standing committee's in camera discussions are being seen as having a better probablity of succeeding as MPs and leaders did not need to indulge in public grandstanding.
The composition of the 15th Lok Sabha with Congress having a decisive 206 MPs gives the bill its best chance yet, all the more so as party chief Sonia Gandhi has given women's quota top billing. With BJP and Left supporting the bill the government is not going to want numbers in the House. It does not have a majority in Rajya Sabha but with some regional parties also supporting the bill, it should be able to manage the floor.
Yet, despite being confident of numbers, senior Congress leaders seem sensitive to the fears of MPs that the "general" pool in Lok Sabha will shrink drastically once 33% quota is added to the existing 22.5% for SCs and STs. There is also concern over a "lottery system" that can arbitrarily turn a seat into a "women's constituency". With the quota opponents having repeatedly demonstrated their capacity to disrupt Parliament, government managers are keen to limit discord.
Leaders like Mulayam Singh and RJD's Lalu Prasad have argued that the women's quota could disadvantage OBC and Muslim women, opening reservation avenues to the upper castes. This has been seen as a convenient "social justice" ruse to essentially oppose the quota but on Monday, interestingly enough, Mulayam Singh said that he would not differentiate on basis of caste and religion as women as a group was disadvantaged. The shift appears to be a recognition of the changed ground realities.
| Editorial |
Who is ruling; India? And how?World's only unique system of oppression is making the slaves enjoy their slaveryDuring our transition from marxism to Ambedkarism in the 1980s we had written three important books — Class-Caste Struggle: Emerging Third Force (1980), Who is Ruling India? (1982) and The Dilemma of Class & Caste in India (1984). In the last one we had reproduced the whole text of manuwadi marxist leader E.M.S. Namboodiripad's scurrilous attack on us. Since then we had completely abandoned the Indian version of manuwadi marxism which the ruling Brahminical Social Order (BSO) used to convert itself into the country's ruling class. Brahminism, the super fine ideology of the Indian ruling class (15%), has no permanent party but only permanent interests. The latest evidence is the way the BSO kicked out its own Brahmana Jati Party (BJP) and brought the country's more cunning original Brahminical party of Congress to power in the recent parliament election (DV Edit June 1, 2009: "Mere 2% anti-Advani upper caste vote swing from BJP brought about spectacular Cong. victory"). Fear of identifying the ruling class: In this leader we are further clarifying our thoughts on the Indian ruling class and how we arrived at the conclusion that the Brahmins (3%) indeed are the rulers with the Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and the shudra landed castes in tow. Our almost 30 years of experience as the Editor of Dalit Voice has reinforced our thoughts and led us to this conclusion. Ashok Rudra, called a marxist economist of the Vishwa Bharati University, Shantiniketan, in his booklet, Intelligentsia as a Ruling Class, more or less says the same thing — of course without identifying the ruling class. Nobody has the courage to identify the ruling class for fear of facing threat to their very survival. Brahmins very often question us how such a micro-minority population can be the rulers and point out the fact that the political class, often mistaken to be the country's real ruling class, has hardly any Brahmin. This is true. The Prime Minister or most of the state chief ministers are not Brahmins. Political power is no power: But political power is no power in India. Politicians are a puppet in the hands of the ruling class. The best example to prove this point is the mere 3% American Jews who do not hold any political power in USA. But it is the Jews as the king-makers who hold the real power in the US with the entire financial sector and media power in their pocket. This is also true in England, France and Germany, all Christian countries, which live under the mercy of Jews. The Khatri Sikh Manmohan Singh may be today's Prime Minister but being a World Bank nominee he automatically becomes the darling of the Brahminical rulers. In fact he is a better Brahmin than the best. The ruling class need not necessarily hold the political power but it still rules with its power to manipulate the "public opinion" which is the case in India. In the case of US and Europe, the Jews hold the reins mainly because of their financial and media power. The European ruling Christians had a long- lasting religious war with the Jews throughout history, but lately they simply surrendered to Jews. Even the Pope dare not go against the Jews. President Barack Obama is challenged by the entire Jewish diaspora, led by the Zionist Israel. Look how Iran was made to tremble just because it elected Ahmedinejad as the President, hated by the entire zionists. Such is the power of the micro-minority Jews. Unparalleled example of India: But in India the ruling Brahminical micro-minority of 3% enjoys such a powerful sway over the country, even to the extent of a total mind control over the entire masses of people because of its legendary religious power since thousands of years. Brahminism is an ideology, considered religious and sacred, that declares that the Brahmins are the highest people by birth and birthright, Bhoodevatas (gods on earth), that the Vedas are the source of authority, and that the rites and rituals that make up the Varnashrama Dharma are sacred and must be followed. In Christian US and Europe, the Jews do not have such a religious control on the country and its peoples but in India Brahminical people being the custodians of their artificially manufactured Hindu religion, enjoy the highest ritual status, becoming the virtual Bhoodevatas, gods on earth — a status which no section of the population enjoys in any part of the world except India. Shudras & BCs as oppressors: That is how the Brahminical people constitute the Intelligentsia because they control not only the country's principal religion (Hindu) but also all its gods, scriptures — and finally the very value system. Dr. Ambedkar has said all these things long, long back and hence there is no point in repeating the argument that the Brahminical people constitute the ruling class of India. A powerful section within the Dalit community, however, has been arguing that it is not the Brahmins who are kicking, killing, burning, raping and destroying the little property of the Dalits in the rural side but the landed shudra and Backward Castes. They cite the example of the Khairlanji massacre of Dalits in Maharashtra and ever so many places. There is good lot of truth in this argument. Brahminical journalists have invested a lot in making the Dalits believe this argument. It is a fact that all over India it is the shudra, the BC or OBCs who are culprits in anti-Dalit pogrom. We know it. But what is important is not the action of looting and killing the Dalits. But the thought, the inspiration behind the action. Caste hatred is the real villain: As the mosquito bites you, one hand instantly acts to slap the mosquito and kills it or drive it away. Who gave the order to the hand to attack the mosquito? It is the brain. The order to attack the mosquito came from the brain. Therefore, the brain that orders the attack is more important than the hand which simply obeyed the order. Some urchins throw a stone at a running dog. But even such a brainless animal does not chase the stone or growl at the stone. It gets angry and chases the fellow who threw the stone. Even the dog has that much of brain to identify the culprit. Here the culprit is not the stone but the boy who threw the stone. Who gave the poisonous thought to the shudras and OBCs to kick or kill the Dalit? The Bhoodevata philosophy. In all anti-Dalit atrocities the crime is committed by the shudra or BCs. There is no dispute on this. But the culprit behind the curtain is the Brahminical thought of caste hatred daily injected into the veins of the shudras and BCs who consider themselves superior. Culprits behind anti-Muslim riots: This is also true in the case of all anti-Muslim riots. In the Babri Masjid demolition, the Dalits played a major role. In the Gujarat Genocide (2002), Dalits led the anti-Muslim violence. We know it. But it is the Brahminical thought that made the innocent Dalits to attack and kill Muslims against whom Dalits have no grouse as both are blood brothers. Marathas hate Brahmins: In Maharashtra, the Marathas (Shiv Dharma) are furious with Brahmins and have launched a powerful campaign against Brahmins. But in Khairlanji the same Marathas and their cousins Kunbis and other OBCs killed the Dalits. The Marathas and Kunbis hate Brahmins for riding them and yet they also hate the Dalits who are the worst victims of Brahminism. Who is managing this two-way action of the Marathas and Kunbis? The Brahminical hand behind the curtain. This is the case in all anti-Dalit and anti-Muslim war and violence where the principal villain is the Brahmin whose value system has brainwashed the shudras and BCs to hate the Dalits and Muslims. The violence against Dalits on one side and Muslims on the other keep the society permanently divided. Brahminism thrives through divide and rule. Because Brahminism has its monopoly media it can manufacture any spurious argument and sell it as supreme truth. Besides, anybody selling this spurious product is given award and reward plus publicity in the mass media which is the sole Brahminical monopoly. Anything that comes in the media is considered supreme truth. Because, a belief system has been so systematically developed and nurtured that we are made to believe anything the manuwadi media says. Belief system: And that is how a section of the gullible Dalits are "convinced" that Brahmins are good but the shudras and BCs are the criminals. The solution to this anti-Dalit caste atrocities and also anti-Muslim riots is not merely punishing the shudras and BCs. Yes this is also a must. But the more important and ever lasting solution is the destruction of the very caste system (Hinduism) for which the Bhoodevatas are not ready. They want merely the anti-Dalit war and violence must end by punishing the shudras and BCs but keeping in tact the Brahminical Social Order which is the cause of action. Quite a number of Bhoodevatas have criticised us for calling the Brahminical people as the country's ruling class. Their defence is there are hardly any Brahmin in the Union Cabinet or the state cabinet. They say the power to rule has percolated from the Brahmins downwards to the landed shudras and Backward Castes. Yes. They are right. It is the thought that rules — not the person: Those who pinpoint this are depending upon a concept of "ruling class" which has the power to confuse those who are willing to be confused. A ruling class need not necessarily rule —at least not directly. The process and the power of ruling a society comes from a thought. It is the thought that rules — not the person who sits on the chair. Whoever that sits in the chair is guided by this very same thought, propounded and promulgated by the Brahmin. Whether it is the legislature, judiciary, bureaucracy, the defence forces — they all constitute the sate. The people who function at the different levels of the above limbs of the state may not necessarily be the Brahmin but they are all guided by the supreme Brahminical thought. Who can become the temple priest: That is how even to this day the state continues to uphold the principle that a born Brahmin alone must be the temple archaka (priest). The archaka post may be the lowest and the least paid. Yes. The position and pecuniary benefit is not that matters. There are any number of people ready to hold this post for a lesser salary. The Supreme Court itself decided that a born Brahmin alone can be the temple archaka and none else. Such a decision is being blindly obeyed because it implies that the person of Brahmin alone is holy, sacred and divine. The tirtha (sacred water) can come only from the shankha (conch). What comes out from other things is just water —not tirtha. Ruling class need not rule: The rural kulaks and industrial tycoons do constitute a part of the ruling class. But it is subordinate to the Brahmin because his person alone is holy, sacred and divine. In other words the ruling class cannot be defined by the act of ruling. It is the thought that rules. Not the person who holds the power. This was so throughout the Indian history. Even during the 800 to 1,000 years of Muslim rule it was the Brahmins who have been the Prime Ministers and the real rulers. The ruling class need not necessarily rule but its thought serves the interests of that class as against the interests of the other non-ruling classes. Dr. Ambedkar verdict: In other words the govt. has to serve the interests of the ruling class. If it does not, that govt. will be removed. How does the ruling class rule? How does the ruling class see that its interests are promoted and protected? This question can be easily understood when it concerns the interests of Muslims (15%), Christians (2.5%), Sikhs (2.5%). And particularly the Dalits (20%) and Tribals (10%). Even the Backward Castes (35%). Almost 85% of the country's toiling masses have been complaining ever since "independence" of consistent and continuous discrimination, if not total neglect. All of them have invariably pointed their accusing finger at the Brahminical rulers. Dr. Ambedkar was the most prominent among the leaders of this underclass which singled out the Brahminical class as the only cause of their plight and persecution. That is how the Indian state has been openly hostile to the interests of the Dalits, tribals, OBCs, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs. Over 85% of the population. The state is hostile because the ruling class wants it to be so. The Brahminical interests will be served only if the state is against the interests of the Bahujan Samaj. Media keeps out Dalits: The composition of the country's media — print and electronic — will help us understand which is India's ruling class. A survey was made in the capital city of Delhi (DV Edit April 1, 2008: "Media monopoly helps upper castes to rule India by suppressing truth". & p. 5: "Brahmins hold 49% top jobs in national media") and the finding was that the capital's journalistic fraternity is totally Brahminical with hardly any representation from Dalits. There may be here and there some Muslims but they are chosen only after finding out their loyalty to the ruling class. Ruling class is the Intelligentsia: Ashok Rudra in his treatise refers to the Indian ruling class. He says the country's Intelligentsia is the ruling class and he defines this class as those "persons who earn their living by the sale of mental labour". This class does not include businessmen. He lists five categories of people: (1) White collar employees, (2) employees in govt. services, (3) teachers, lawyers, judges (4) artists, journalists, writers), (5) professional politicians. Mischief of middle class: It is this five classes often described in the media as the "middle class" which is the euphemism used to hide the "ruling class". Meira Kumar as pet dog: Are there no members of the SC/ST/BC or Muslim/Christian/Sikh in this "middle class"? Yes there are. They will be admitted to this exclusive club of closed coterie only after testing their value system. Once they are found to toe the Brahminical line they will be not only admitted but paraded as a pet dog. Presently Meira Kumar, a Dalit, is on the parade. Farukh Abdullah was hailed as a secular Muslim. The ruling class, therefore, need not be necessarily Brahminical. Underdogs ready to eat the Brahminical shit will be its honoured members. That is how an OBC oil crushing lowly jati fellow, Narendra Modi, is being projected as the future PM for his sterling quality of killing 2,500 Muslims in the "Gujarat Genocide - 2002". In other words, the ruling class need not necessarily be Brahmin. Bum-lickers are most welcome to join this exclusive club as chamchas and chaprasis to carry out the job of disciplining the SC/ST/BCs and Muslim/Christian/Sikhs. What is important is your ideology. Your value system. Not necessarily the caste. To that extent the caste rigidity is relaxed. But not the Brahminical ideology. The thought is not compromised. Underdogs who subscribe to this thought are admitted — of course closely watched. A member of the Brahminical ruling class need not be rich. But he must have the ability to propagate the ruling class thought. Why Paswan is loved: What is important is the Brahminical thought and the one who upholds this thought need not be a Brahmin. Ram Vilas Paswan, an Untouchable, is the blue-eyed boy of the Brahmins because he is a volatile votary of the Brahminical thought. Women's Bill: Women's Reservation Bill is a good example to prove the power of the ruling Brahminical class which wants 1/3 seats in parliament to be reserved for women so that it can fill up parliament with their women. But SC/ST/BCs and Muslims say that women's reservation is fine but their women must have the quota within the quota. In a democracy every section has the right to be represented. It is their democratic right but the rulers have denounced the opponents as anti-women and the media is painting them as women-haters. All those who depend on this manuwadi media is made to believe their version. Rulers believe what they want to believe and also make others believe. This is the power of the ruling class. Education goes to dogs: There is not a single media except the Dalit Voice which has denounced the proposed women's Bill as anti-woman. Take the education field, which is the most important sector to shape the thoughts of the youths. It is here that we find a total domination of the Brahminical class. Its interest is in the higher education to prepare their kids for overseas jobs and kushy living. So much so the entire primary and elementary education has gone to dogs. Dismissal from Indian Express: Dangerous values are injected into the veins of the youth through textbooks which are prepared by the Brahminical writers. Education, journalism, TV, cinema, theatre, painting, culture etc. are all dominated by this class. These are the principal thought-manufacturing sectors which are closely guarded. We were dismissed from the Indian Express only because we challenged the Brahminical thought which none dare do. Money corruption: India today is considered one among the most corrupt countries in the world. Money corruption is not the only variety of corruptions. Rather, money corruption is the last of the four varieties of corruption: (1) Money corruption, (2) moral corruption, (3) caste corruption, (4) intellectual corruption. The last, intellectual corruption, is the worst form of corruption and this field is the total monopoly of the Brahminical rulers. Money corruption is the last and the least harmful varieties of corruption. Since the rulers themselves are corrupt, every other section in the society has also become corrupt. And that is how the money corruption — the most visible form of corruption — has become so rampant. Supreme Court judges themselves are being mentioned by fellow judges. When the Hindu temples could be the fountain head of corruption every other form of corruption is effectively sealed and safeguarded. In other words, it is the thought that has to be clean and sublime. It is the thought which manufactures and shapes an ideology. When the thought itself is corrupt and the media promotes; it, as a country India is simply sinking. (India As a Failed State, DSA-2004). Corrupt fellows hailed: The beauty of the Indian society is that it is not happy with an incorruptible person. He becomes an unfit and avoided, if not cursed. His own wife, parents and the family feels the fellow is useless. They say he is unhelpful. Only the corrupt is not only popular but very much liked by the society. Because he adjusts himself to any occasion and any person. That is how the corrupt; person, whether a minister, judge, bureaucrat or any official is extremely popular. It is the incorruptible, simple living person who is called useless and spurned by the society. Why the Indian society has come to lionise Khetan Parekh, Harshad Mehta etc. because they corrupted the entire system and the Brahminical rulers carried them on their head as if they are our model. Kerala CM hated: Who can save such a society which praises and parades persons who are killers like Narendra Modi, Harshad Mehta. Achutanandan, the most popular CM of Kerala, a man of character, incorruptible, becomes the most hated person in the marxist party. Brahminical thought not only grows out of corruption but breeds only corruption — particularly intellectual corruption which is the fountain head of all other three varieties of corruption. That is how in the recent parliament election money power was so openly used to win and none bothered about it. Even MPs with criminal past are co-opted because they are all products of Brahminism. That is how the our property, posts and wealth are all concentrated in the hands of a micro-minority 15% of the country's 1,200 million population. Role of media: All this socialist shibboleth, Aam Admi Andolan are bullshit. Brahminical rulers are ruling us only with the help of their Brahminical media. The communists are the essential part of this conspiracy to keep the country in the Brahminical hands. Caste-wise census, income statistics are all prohibited because that would reveal which castes have prospered at whose cost. Poverty yardstick: The rulers have ruled that "economic yardstick" (poverty) should be the sole criterion for backwardness and not the time-tested "caste". Because if caste is taken as the yardstick, over 65% of the SC/ST/BCs and socially backward Muslims and Christians will come under the "Backward list" and if the funds are diverted to their welfare they will gain and challenge the Brahminical hegemony. Right from the Brahminical judiciary, media and the govt. all of them have fallen in line with this Brahminical thought. Did we not say that it is the thought that rules and not the person in authority? Half the people of India live below the poverty line. And they are entertained and made dumb and deaf by preaching them Hindu thoughts of papa, punya, punar janma (rebirth), fate — all dangerous thoughts which again make them pour their little savings into the coffers of the temples. The proverbial Indian poverty in fact enriches the rulers and helps them remain as rulers. The manufacturers of Brahminical ideology (thought) are all flourishing because they help the rulers to keep the 2/3 of the country's havenots as slaves. Cricket to entertain the masses: They are entertained by the cricket fever which is yet another ruling class poison to keep the masses enthralled. Education system is chaotic. India is shortly becoming the world's largest country of illiterates. Who cares? How to keep the SC/ST/BCs and Muslim and Christian poor, powerless and enslaved is the sole guiding rule of the "intelligentsia" who are the country's ruling class. It is this ruling class which provides the leadership to the country. Ruling class never identified: This intelligentsia constitutes the Brahminical class — though no writer or speaker has the courage to identify and name this country's principal contradiction — except the Dalit Voice. That is how we get a daily dosage of hate mails and even threats. For what? For identifying the enemy oppressor. The Brahminical advice to us is: "You go on writing all your muck without identifying the oppressor" so that the ruling Brahminical class goes on sucking the blood uninterrupted without being identified, without being named. They have introduced several provisions in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to punish and finish those who identify the enemy. Parashuram slaughters Kshatriyas: The Kshatriyas, now called Thakurs, immediately "below" the Brahmin in the Chaturvarna order (the other name for the caste system), were literally slaughtered in thousands by the Brahmin killer god, Parasurama. The Chitpavan Brahmins, who produced Nathuram Godse, the killer of M.K. Gandhi, proudly displayed the huge cutout of their god at their recent jati conference at Pune. Kshatriya surrender: Kerala is called the Parasurama Shristi. The Brahmin-Kshatriya rivalry and hatred was so bitter and deep. But soon they surrendered to Brahmins and since then acted as the bodyguards of the Bhoodevatas. The Vaishya (Banias) has the third-ranking poverty-stricken varna. In Bihar, the Banias are classified under the Backward Castes. It is only M.K. Gandhi who lifted his jatwalas and made them moneybags on the condition they will forever remain loyal to the Bhoodevatas. Today, the Banias earn billions and feed the Bhoodevatas. Perfect understanding. That is how the Brahmins co-opted the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas. Shudras won over: The shudras, forming the fourth varna of the Hindu Chaturvarna, have been blood enemies of the Bhoodevatas. The anti-Brahmin movement that waged during the British rule and immediately after the "independence" was led by the landed shudra castes like the Marathas, Jats, Reddis, Patels, Nairs, Vokkaligas, Mudaliars, Naidus etc. But soon they were also co-opted and that is how the mere 3% Bhoodevatas consolidated their position by enlarging their strength to 15% of the country's population and became the ruling class of India. Goodbye to land reform: The shudras are essentially the landed gentry. They were co-opted to the ruling class by not implementing the land reform. In the rural area land is power. The shudra power is allowed to reign supreme and thereby co-opted to the BSO. This 15% ruling class has all the wealth, education, ritual status, beauty, caste superiority, personality, landed property. And that is how it became the country's ruling class — guided and supervised by the 3% Brahminical micro-minority intelligentsia — frustrating every socio-economic-cultural "reforms" launched since "independence". Swiss Bank account-holders: Of course there are exceptions to the rule. But please note it is the exception that proves the rule. Take the case of the people having secret accounts in the Swiss banks. Or the latest list of multi-billionaires published in the Times of India. Are there anybody from the SC/ST/BCs? Or even Muslim or Christian? There may be one or two but they are the exceptions that only prove the rule. The rule is the 15% Brahminical Social Order is the ruling class. Manmohan Singh or even his grand father will have no courage to touch the Swiss bank hidden money. How the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas were co-opted? The Bhoodevatas used social, economic, political and even psychological weapons to annex them into their fold. Today all the three are together and united. Once the three most powerful dwija varnas came together, annexing the "unthinking" shudras was no problem. Gods on earth: That is how the Brahminical people became the unquestioned leaders — not only politically but also economically. What gave the solid strength to their leadership is their supreme ritual status as the Bhoodevatas, meaning the gods on earth. Whether it is the Congress, BJP or even the communist parties the Bhoodevatas shall be the guiding spirit. Their unwritten law extends to every sphere — media, education, commerce and industry, judiciary — and even sports which in Hindu India means only cricket — the only "game" that suits the idli sambar grass-eaters. Even if there is a revolution in India, it can be led only by a Bhoodevata. That is how E.M.S. Namboodiripad became the country's greatest marxist and finally presided over the death of marxism. "Mahatma" shot dead: Budha, Guru Ravidas, Mahatma Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Sri Narayana Guru, Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy and many more worked to destroy this ruling class and its Hindu caste system. And in the process they only got destroyed. The Muslims realised the supreme truth belatedly and sought a separate homeland. The Bhoodevatas used the "Gandhi weapon" to fight the Muslims and as soon as the Mahatma succeeded he was shot dead by a Chitpavan Brahmin (Why Godse Killed Gandhi?, DSA-1997). As this is written we are in total darkness. The country itself is sinking, surrounded by deadly enemies all around. Even the thinking Bhoodevatas themselves are not getting sound sleep in the night. Anything and everything they touch is turning into charcoal. We the oppressed over 85% are helpless. But here we have a unique country — the only one in the world — where the rulers themselves are deeply worried. Feeling insecure. Suspecting their own shadows. The country is neither living nor dead. It is brain dead. Its name is "Hindu India". |
Chronic Hunger and the Status of Women in India
Carol S. Coonrod, June 1998
Introductory Quotes
You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women.
- Jawaharlal Nehru
However much a mother may love her children, it is all but impossible for her to provide high-quality child care if she herself is poor and oppressed, illiterate and uninformed, anaemic and unhealthy, has five or six other children, lives in a slum or shanty, has neither clean water nor safe sanitation, and if she is without the necessary support either from health services, or from her society, or from the father of her childen.
- Vulimiri Ramalingaswami, "The Asian Enigma"
The women who participate in and lead ecology movements in countries like India are not speaking merely as victims. Their voices are the voices of liberation and transformation. . . The women's and ecology movements are therefore one, and are primarily counter-trends to a patriarchal maldevelopment.
- Vandana Shiva
Amartya Sen - The Unheeded Conscience: We will lionise him, but will we ever listen to what he's saying?
Sen points out that when he took up issues of women's welfare, he was accused in India of voicing "foreign concerns." "I was told Indian women don't think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don't think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that."
- Parmita Shastri, Outlook India, 1998
Executive Summary
The persistence of hunger and abject poverty in India and other parts of the world is due in large measure to the subjugation, marginalization and disempowerment of women. Women suffer from hunger and poverty in greater numbers and to a great degree then men. At the same time, it is women who bear the primary responsibility for actions needed to end hunger: education, nutrition, health and family income.
Looking through the lens of hunger and poverty, there are seven major areas of discrimination against women in India:
Malnutrition: India has exceptionally high rates of child malnutrition, because tradition in India requires that women eat last and least throughout their lives, even when pregnant and lactating. Malnourished women give birth to malnourished children, perpetuating the cycle.
Poor Health: Females receive less health care than males. Many women die in childbirth of easily prevented complications. Working conditions and environmental pollution further impairs women's health.
Lack of education: Families are far less likely to educate girls than boys, and far more likely to pull them out of school, either to help out at home or from fear of violence.
Overwork: Women work longer hours and their work is more arduous than men's, yet their work is unrecognized. Men report that "women, like children, eat and do nothing." Technological progress in agriculture has had a negative impact on women.
Unskilled: In women's primary employment sector - agriculture - extension services overlook women.
Mistreatment: In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in atrocities against women in India, in terms of rapes, assaults and dowry-related murders. Fear of violence suppresses the aspirations of all women. Female infanticide and sex-selective abortions are additional forms of violence that reflect the devaluing of females in Indian society.
Powerlessness: While women are guaranteed equality under the constitution, legal protection has little effect in the face of prevailing patriarchal traditions. Women lack power to decide who they will marry, and are often married off as children. Legal loopholes are used to deny women inheritance rights.
India has a long history of activism for women's welfare and rights, which has increasingly focused on women's economic rights. A range of government programs have been launched to increase economic opportunity for women, although there appear to be no existing programs to address the cultural and traditional discrimination against women that leads to her abject conditions.
The Inextricable Link
The greatest tragedy facing humanity today is the persistence of chronic hunger - an intolerable phenomenon that takes the lives of 24,000 of us every day. For fully one-fifth of humanity, life is a daily struggle to survive in conditions of relentless poverty. Day after day, the lives of one billion individuals are cut short or terribly diminished by chronic, persistent hunger. Day after day, one billion people are denied the opportunities they need to lead healthy and productive lives.
People living with chronic hunger exist in conditions of severe poverty. What they lack is the chance to change their situation, to develop their own self-sufficiency. The most potent confirmation of this fact can be seen in the lives of women. They, along with their children, are the main victims of hunger, and they are also most lacking in opportunities to end their own and their families' hunger.
The Hunger Project has come to the recognition that the persistence of hunger in India - and elsewhere in the world where hunger is still an overriding social issue - is, to a large degree, due to the subjugation, marginalization and disempowerment of women. Furthermore, women's suppression is rooted in the very fabric of Indian society - in traditions, in religious doctrine and practices, within the educational and legal systems, and within families.
Ironically, much of the essential work of ending hunger rests in women's hands.
Traditionally, women bear primary responsibility for the well-being of their families. Yet they are systematically denied access to the resources they need to fulfill their responsibility, which includes education, health care services, job training, and access and freedom to use family planning services.
In order to gain a shared understanding of the condition of the status of women in India and its impact on the persistence of hunger, this document surveys papers done by leading scholars in Indian development issues. It is organized in a framework of seven issues that characterize the plight of resource-poor women, with a focus on rural women, in India: malnutrition, poor health, lack of education, overwork, lack of skills, mistreatment and powerlessness.
The link between these issues and the persistence of hunger in India was underscored in a 1996 study: The Asian Enigma, by Vulimiri Ramalingaswami:
In short, the poor care that is afforded to girls and women by their husbands and by elders is the first major reason for levels of child malnutrition that are markedly higher in South Asia than anywhere else in the world.
India: An Overview
India, with a population of 989 million, is the world's second most populous country. Of that number, 120 million are women who live in poverty.
India has 16 percent of the world's population, but only 2.4 percent of its land, resulting in great pressures on its natural resources.
Over 70 percent of India's population currently derive their livelihood from land resources, which includes 84 percent of the economically-active women.
India is one of the few countries where males significantly outnumber females, and this imbalance has increased over time. India's maternal mortality rates in rural areas are among the world's highest. From a global perspective, Indian accounts for 19 percent of all lives births and 27 percent of all maternal deaths.
"There seems to be a consensus that higher female mortality between ages one and five and high maternal mortality rates result in a deficit of females in the population. Chatterjee (1990) estimates that deaths of young girls in India exceed those of young boys by over 300,000 each year, and every sixth infant death is specifically due to gender discrimination." Of the 15 million baby girls born in India each year, nearly 25 percent will not live to see their 15th birthday.
"Although India was the first country to announce an official family planning program in 1952, its population grew from 361 million in 1951 to 844 million in 1991. India's total fertility rate of 3.8 births per woman can be considered moderate by world standards, but the sheer magnitude of population increase has resulted in such a feeling of urgency that containment of population growth is listed as one of the six most important objectives in the Eighth Five-Year Plan."
Since 1970, the use of modern contraceptive methods has risen from 10 percent to 40 percent, with great variance between northern and southern India. The most striking aspect of contraceptive use in India is the predominance of sterilization, which accounts for more than 85 percent of total modern contraception use, with female sterilization accounting for 90 percent of all sterilizations.
The Indian constitution grants women equal rights with men, but strong patriarchal traditions persist, with women's lives shaped by customs that are centuries old. In most Indian families, a daughter is viewed as a liability, and she is conditioned to believe that she is inferior and subordinate to men. Sons are idolized and celebrated. May you be the mother of a hundred sons is a common Hindu wedding blessing.
The origin of the Indian idea of appropriate female behavior can be traced to the rules laid down by Manu in 200 B.C.: "by a young girl, by a young woman, or even by an aged one, nothing must be done independently, even in her own house". "In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent."
A study of women in the Swayam Shikshan Prayog (SSP), based in 20 villages in four districts in Maharashtra state was introduced in this way:
The primary issue all women in the SSP were struggling with was that of everyday survival. Insufficient incomes and the lack of employment were reported to be their most pressing concerns. Survival is a constant preoccupation and at its most basic, survival means food (Chambers 1983). The most common problems were the lack of basic amenities such as food, water, fuel, fodder and health facilities. In addition, the deterioration of the natural environment and the fact that many of their traditional occupations were no longer viable were conditions that were making it increasingly hard for women to continue sustaining their families, as they had done in the past.
SSP is a loose, informal network of women's collectives, voluntary organizations, action groups and unions.
Women Are Malnourished
The exceptionally high rates of malnutrition in South Asia are rooted deeply in the soil of inequality between men and women.
"...the poor care that is afforded to girls and women by their husbands and by elders is the first major reason for levels of child malnutrition that are markedly higher in South Asia than anywhere else in the world."
This point is made in the article, The Asian Enigma, published by Unicef in the 1996 Progress of Nations, in which the rates of childhood malnutrition in South Asia are compared with those in Africa. We learn that malnutrition is far worse in South Asia, directly due to the fact that women in South Asia have less voice and freedom of movement than in Africa. "Judgement and self-expression and independence largely denied, millions of women in South Asia have neither the knowledge nor the means nor the freedom to act in their own and their children's best interests."
"Gender disparities in nutrition are evident from infancy to adulthood. In fact, gender has been the most statistically significant determinant of malnutrition among young children and malnutrition is a frequent direct or underlying cause of death among girls below age 5. Girls are breast-fed less frequently and for shorter durations in infancy; in childhood and adulthood, males are fed first and better. Adult women consume approximately 1,000 fewer calories per day than men according to one estimate from Punjab. Comparison of household dietary intake studies in different parts of the country shows that nutritional equity between males and females is lower in northern than in southern states."
Nutritional deprivation has two major consequences for women: they never reach their full growth potential and anaemia. Both are risk factors in pregnancy, with anaemia ranging from 40-50 percent in urban areas to 50-70 percent in rural areas. This condition complicates childbearing and result in maternal and infant deaths, and low birth weight infants.
One study found anaemia in over 95 percent of girls ages 6-14 in Calcutta, around 67 percent in the Hyderabad area, 73 percent in the New Delhi area, and about 18 percent in the Madras area. This study states, "The prevalence of anaemia among women ages 15-24 and 25-44 years follows similar patterns and levels. Besides posing risks during pregnancy, anaemia increases women's susceptibility to diseases such as tuberculosis and reduces the energy women have available for daily activities such as household chores, child care, and agricultural labor. Any severely anaemic individual is taxed by most physical activities, including walking at an ordinary pace.
Women Are in Poor Health
Surviving through a normal life cycle is a resource-poor woman's greatest challenge.
"The practice of breast-feeding female children for shorter periods of time reflects the strong desire for sons. If women are particularly anxious to have a male child, they may deliberately try to become pregnant again as soon as possible after a female is born. Conversely, women may consciously seek to avoid another pregnancy after the birth of a male child in order to give maximum attention to the new son."
A primary way that parents discriminate against their girl children is through neglect during illness. When sick, little girls are not taken to the doctor as frequently as are their brothers. A study in Punjab shows that medical expenditures for boys are 2.3 times higher than for girls.
As adults, women get less health care than men. They tend to be less likely to admit that they are sick and they'll wait until their sickness has progressed before they seek help or help is sought for them. Studies on attendance at rural primary health centers reveal that more males than females are treated in almost all parts of the country, with differences greater in northern hospitals than southern ones, pointing to regional differences in the value placed on women. Women's socialization to tolerate suffering and their reluctance to be examined by male personnel are additional constraints in their getting adequate health care.
Maternal Mortality
India's maternal mortality rates in rural areas are among the highest in the world.
A factor that contributes to India's high maternal mortality rate is the reluctance to seek medical care for pregnancy - it is viewed as a temporary condition that will disappear. The estimates nationwide are that only 40-50 percent of women receive any antenatal care. Evidence from the states of Bihar, Rajasthan, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat find registration for maternal and child health services to be as low as 5-22 percent in rural areas and 21-51 percent in urban areas.
Even a woman who has had difficulties with previous pregnancies is usually treated with home remedies only for three reasons: the decision that a pregnant woman seek help rests with the mother-in-law and husband; financial considerations; and fear that the treatment may be more harmful than the malady.
It is estimated that pregnancy-related deaths account for one-quarter of all fatalities among women aged 15 to 29, with well over two-thirds of them considered preventable. For every maternal death in India, an estimated 20 more women suffer from impaired health. One village-level study of rural women in Maharashtra determined on the basis of physical examinations that some 92 percent suffered from one or more gynecological disorder.
Contraception Use
Women's health is harmed by lack of access to and the poor quality of reproductive services.
"About 24.6 million couples, representing roughly 18 percent of all married women, want no more children but are not using contraception. (Operations Research Group, 1990). The causes of this unmet need remain poorly understood, but a qualitative study in Tamil Nadu suggests that women's lack of decision-making power in the family, opportunity costs involved in seeking contraception, fear of child death, and poor quality of contraceptive service all play an important role." (Ravindran 1993).
Some estimates suggest that some 5 million abortions are performed annually in India, with the large majority being illegal. As a result, abortion-related mortality is high. Although abortion has been legal since 1972 in India, "studies suggest that although official policy seeks to make pregnancy-termination services widely available, in practice guidelines on abortion limit access to services, particularly in rural areas. In 1981, of the 6,200 physicians trained to perform abortions, only 1,600 were working in rural areas."
Job Impact on Maternal Health
Working conditions result in premature and stillbirths.
The tasks performed by women are usually those that require them to be in one position for long periods of time, which can adversely affect their reproductive health. A study in a rice-growing belt of coastal Maharashtra found that 40 percent of all infant deaths occurred in the months of July to October. The study also found that a majority of births were either premature or stillbirths. The study attributed this to the squatting position that had to be assumed during July and August, the rice transplanting months.
Impact of Pollution on Women
Women's health is further harmed by air and water pollution and lack of sanitation.
The impact of pollution and industrial wastes on health is considerable. In Environment, Development and the Gender Gap, Sandhya Venkateswaran asserts that "the high incidence of malnutrition present amongst women and their low metabolism and other health problems affect their capacity to deal with chemical stress. The smoke from household biomass (made up of wood, dung and crop residues) stoves within a three-hour period is equivalent to smoking 20 packs of cigarettes. For women who spend at least three hours per day cooking, often in a poorly ventilated area, the impact includes eye problems, respiratory problems, chronic bronchitis and lung cancer. One study quoted by WHO in 1991 found that pregnant women cooking over open biomass stoves had almost a 50 percent higher chance of stillbirth.
Anaemia makes a person more susceptible to carbon monoxide toxicity, which is one of the main pollutants in the biomass smoke. Given the number of Indian women who are anaemic - 25 to 30 percent in the reproductive age group and almost 50 percent in the third trimester - this adds to their vulnerability to carbon monoxide toxicity.
Additionally, with an increasing population, diseases caused by waste disposal, such as hookworm, are rampant. People who work barefooted are particularly susceptible, and it has been found that hookworm is directly responsible for the high percentage of anaemia among rural women.
Women Are Uneducated
Women and girls receive far less education than men, due both to social norms and fears of violence.
India has the largest population of non-school-going working girls.
India's constitution guarantees free primary school education for both boys and girls up to age 14. This goal has been repeatedly reconfirmed, but primary education in India is not universal. Overall, the literacy rate for women is 39 percent versus 64 percent for men. The rate for women in the four large northern states - Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh - is lower than the national average: it was 25 percent in 1991. Attendance rates from the 1981 census suggest that no more than 1/3 of all girls (and a lower proportion of rural girls) aged 5-14 are attending school.
Although substantial progress has been achieved since India won its independence in 1947, when less than 8 percent of females were literate, the gains have not been rapid enough to keep pace with population growth: there were 16 million more illiterate females in 1991 than in 1981.
Sonalde Desai in Gender Inequalities and Demographic Behavior asserts that "parents' reluctance to educate daughters has its roots in the situation of women. Parents have several incentives for not educating their daughters. Foremost is the view that education of girls brings no returns to parents and that their future roles, being mainly reproductive and perhaps including agricultural labor, require no formal education. As more and more boys are engaged in education, there is a growing reliance on the labor of girls. Girls are increasingly replacing their brothers on the farm while carrying on their usual responsibilities in housework. A large proportion of the roughly 40 million "nonworking" girls who are not in school are kept at home because of responsibilities in housework."
The role of parents is to deliver a chaste daughter to her husband's family. Sonalde Desai goes on to point out that "another disincentive for sending daughters to school is a concern for the protection of their virginity. When schools are located at a distance, when teachers are male, and when girls are expected to study along with boys, parents are often unwilling to expose their daughters to the potential assault on their virginity."
There is little response to counter these obstacles: school hours remain inflexible to the labor demands of girls; many villages do not have a school; and fewer than 1/3 of India's primary and middle-school teachers are women.
According to Mapping Progress, "educational funds were cut by 801.3 million rupees in the 1991-92 budget. Funds for the mass literacy movement, in which women participate enthusiastically, have been reduced by 5 percent from the previous year. Budgetary provisions for non-formal education have been cut by 17 percent, leading to closure of many night schools and adult education programs in which working-class women participate. Reduction in government expenditures on higher education and encouragement to private colleges will reduce women's opportunities for higher education since privatization in education promotes only male-dominated professional and technical courses, as they are lucrative."
Women Are Overworked
Women work longer hours and their work is more arduous than men's. Still, men report that "women, like children, eat and do nothing."
Hours worked
Women work roughly twice as many as many hours as men.
Women's contribution to agriculture - whether it be subsistence farming or commercial agriculture - when measured in terms of the number of tasks performed and time spent, is greater than men. "The extent of women's contribution is aptly highlighted by a micro study conducted in the Indian Himalayas which found that on a one-hectare farm, a pair of bullocks works 1,064 hours, a man 1,212 hours and a woman 3,485 hours in a year."
In Andhra Pradesh, (Mies 1986) found that the work day of an woman agricultural labourer during the agricultural season lasts for 15 hours, from 4 am to 8 pm, with an hour's rest in between. Her male counterpart works for seven to eight hours, from 5 am to 10 am or 11 am and from 3 pm to 5 pm.
Another study on time and energy spent by men and women on agricultural work (Batliwala 1982) found that 53 percent of the total human hours per household are contributed by women as compared to 31 percent by men. The remaining contribution comes from children.
The linking of agricultural activities to male dominance is described by Roy Burman (in Menon 1991):
The anxiety of man to monopolize his skill in plough culture is reflected in the taboo that is observed almost all over India, against the women's handling the plough. In many societies, she is not even allowed to touch it.
Mies further observed that "whereas operations performed by men were those that entailed the use of machinery and draught animals, thereby using animal, hydraulic, mechanical or electrical energy, women almost always relied on manual labour, using only their own energy." Rice transplantations, the most arduous and labour intensive task in rice cultivation, is carried out entirely by women without the help of any tools.
"Girls learn to assist their mothers in almost all tasks, and from the age of 10 years participate fully in the agricultural work done by women. Mies cites the case of Laxmi, a three-year-old infant who, along with her mother, pulled seedlings for transplanting. Boys on the other hand were seldom seen transplanting or weeding though they did help out in ploughing or watering the fields."
"Not only do women perform more tasks, their work is also more arduous than that undertaken by men. Both transplantation and weeding require women to spend the whole day and work in muddy soil with their hands. Moreover, they work the entire day under the intensely hot sun while men's work, such as ploughing and watering the fields, is invariably carried out early in the morning before the sun gets too hot. Mies argues that because women's work, unlike men's, does not involve implements and is based largely on human energy, it is considered unskilled and hence less productive. On this basis, women are invariably paid lower wages, despite the fact that they work harder and for longer hours than do men."
In contrast, a study in Uttar Pradesh reports that men "only reluctantly conceded that their womenfolk really work. The researchers in this area were repeatedly told that women, like children, simply eat food and do nothing."
The invisibility of women's work
Women's work is rarely recognized.
Many maintain that women's economic dependence on men impacts their power within the family. With increased participation in income-earning activities, not only will there be more income for the family, but gender inequality should be reduced. This issue is particularly salient in India because studies show a very low level of female participation in the labor force. This under-reporting is attributed to the frequently held view that women's work is not economically productive.
In a report of the National Commission on Self-Employed Women and Women in the Informal Sector, the director of social welfare in one state said, "There are no women in any unorganized sector in our state." When the Commission probed and asked, "Are there any women who go to the forest to collect firewood? Do any of the women in rural areas have cattle?" the director responded with, "Of course, there are many women doing that type of work." Working women are invisible to most of the population.
If all activities - including maintenance of kitchen gardens and poultry, grinding food grains, collecting water and firewood, etc. - are taken into account, then 88 percent of rural housewives and 66 percent of urban housewives can be considered as economically productive.
Women's employment in family farms or businesses is rarely recognized as economically productive, either by men or women. And, any income generated from this work is generally controlled by the men. Such work is unlikely to increase women's participation in allocating family finances. In a 1992 study of family-based texile workers, male children who helped in a home-based handloom mill were given pocket money, but the adult women and girls were not.
The impact of technology on women
The shift from subsistence to a market economy has a dramatic negative impact on women.
According to Sandhya Venkateswaran, citing Shiva, the Green Revolution, which focused on increasing yields of rice and wheat, entailed a shift in inputs from human to technical. Women's participation, knowledge and inputs were marginalized, and their role shift from being "primary producers to subsidiary workers."
Where technology has been introduced in areas where women worked, women labourers have often been displaced by men. Threshing of grain was almost exclusively a female task, and with the introduction of automatic grain threshers - which are only operated by men - women have lost an important source of income.
Combine harvesters leave virtually no residue. This means that this source of fodder is no longer available to women, which has a dramatic impact on women's workload. So too, as cattle dung is being used as fertilizer, there is less available for fuel for cooking.
"Commercialization and the consequent focus on cash crops has led to a situation where food is lifted straight from the farm to the market. The income accrued is controlled by men. Earlier, most of the produce was brought home and stored, and the women exchanged it for other commodities. Such a system vested more control with the women."
Women Are Unskilled
Women have unequal access to resources.
Extension services tend to reach only men, which perpetuates the existing division of labour in the agricultural sector, with women continuing to perform unskilled tasks. A World Bank study in 1991 reveals that the assumption made by extension workers is that information within a family will be transmitted to the women by the men, which in actual practice seldom happens. "The male dominated extension system tends to overlook women's role in agriculture and proves ineffective in providing technical information to women farmers."
Mapping Progress, states, "in the farm sector, the process of mechanization of agricultural activities has brought in tendencies for gender discrimination by replacing men for a number of activities performed by women and also by displacing the labor of women from subsistence and marginal households. Women are employed only when there is absolute shortage of labor and for specific operations like cotton-picking.
"To supply food-processing industries being set up with foreign collaboration, there has already been a major shift from subsistence farming method of rice, millet, corn and wheat to cash-crop production of fruit, mushrooms, flowers and vegetables. This shift has led to women being the first to lose jobs."
A number of factors perpetuate women's limited job skills: if training women for economic activities requires them to leave their village, this is usually a problem for them. Unequal access to education restricts women's abilities to learn skills that require even functional levels of literacy. In terms of skill development, women are impeded by their lack of mobility, low literacy levels and prejudiced attitudes toward women. When women negotiate with banks and government officials, they are often ostracized by other men and women in their community for being 'too forward.' Government and bank officials have preconceived ideas of what women are capable of , and stereotypes of what is considered women's work.
Women Are Mistreated
Violence against women and girls is the most pervasive human rights violation in the world today.
Opening the door on the subject of violence against the world's females is like standing at the threshold of an immense dark chamber vibrating with collective anguish, but with the sounds of protest throttled back to a murmur. Where there should be outrage aimed at an intolerable status quo there is instead denial, and the largely passive acceptance of 'the way things are.'
Male violence against women is a worldwide phenomenon. Although not every woman has experienced it, and many expect not to, fear of violence is an important factor in the lives of most women. It determines what they do, when they do it, where they do it, and with whom. Fear of violence is a cause of women's lack of participation in activities beyond the home, as well as inside it. Within the home, women and girls may be subjected to physical and sexual abuse as punishment or as culturally justified assaults. These acts shape their attitude to life, and their expectations of themselves.
The insecurity outside the household is today the greatest obstacle in the path of women. Conscious that, compared to the atrocities outside the house, atrocities within the house are endurable, women not only continued to accept their inferiority in the house and society, but even called it sweet.
In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in atrocities against women in India. Every 26 minutes a woman is molested. Every 34 minutes a rape takes place. Every 42 minutes a sexual harassment incident occurs. Every 43 minutes a woman is kidnapped. And every 93 minutes a woman is burnt to death over dowry.
One-quarter of the reported rapes involve girls under the age of 16 but the vast majority are never reported. Although the penalty is severe, convictions are rare.
Selective Abortions
The most extreme expression of the preference for sons is female infanticide and sex-selective abortion.
A study of amniocentesis in a Bombay hospital found that 96 percent of female fetuses were aborted, compared with only a small percentage of male fetuses.
"Government officials event suspect that the disproportionate abortion of female fetuses may be a major underlying cause of the recent decline in the nation's sex ratio. In 1971 there were 930 females for every 1,000 males. A decade later this figure had increased to 934, but by 1991, instead of continuing to rise, the ratio dropped to 927, lower than the 1971 figure. This sex ratio is one of the lowest in the world."
Sonalda Desai reports that there are posters in Bombay advertising sex-determination tests that read, "It is better to pay 500 Rs. now than 50,000 Rs. (in dowry) later."
Government has passed legislation to curb the misuse of amniocentesis for sex selection and abortion of female fetuses. Women activists have been critical of this act because of its provision that calls for punishing the women who seek the procedure. These women may be under pressure to bear a male child.
Women Are Powerless
Legal protection of women's rights have little effect in the face of prevailing patriarchal traditions.
Marriage:
Women are subordinate in most marriages.
Exposure to and interactions with the outside world are instrumental in determining the possibilities available to women in their daily lives. The situation of women is affected by the degree of their autonomy or capacity to make decisions both inside and outside their own household.
"The position of women in northern India is notably poor. Traditional Hindu society in northern rural areas is hierarchical and dominated by men, as evidenced by marriage customs. North Indian Hindus are expected to marry within prescribed boundaries: the bride and groom must not be related, they have no say in the matter, and the man must live outside the woman's natal village.
"Wife givers" are socially and ritually inferior to "wife takers", thus necessitating the provision of a dowry. After marriage, the bride moves in with her husband's family. Such a bride is "a stranger in a strange place." They are controlled by the older females in the household, and their behavior reflects on the honor of their husbands. Because emotional ties between spouses are considered a potential threat to the solidarity of the patrilineal group, the northern system tends to segregate the sexes and limit communication between spouses - a circumstance that has direct consequences for family planning and similar "modern" behaviors that affect health. A young Indian bride is brought up to believe that her own wishes and interests are subordinate to those of her husband and his family. The primary duty of a newly married young woman, and virtually her only means of improving her position in the hierarchy of her husband's household, is to bear sons."
Sonalde Desai points out that the perception that sons are the major source of economic security in old age is so strong in the north that "many parents, while visiting their married daughters, do not accept food or other hospitality from them. However, given women's low independent incomes and lack of control over their earnings, few can provide economic support to their parents even if parents were willing to accept it."
In the south, in contrast, a daughter traditionally marries her mother's brother or her mother's brother's son (her first cousin). Such an arrangement has a dramatic impact on women. "In southern India, men are likely to marry women to whom they are related, so that the strict distinction found in the north between patrilineal and marital relatives is absent. Women are likely to be married into family households near their natal homes, and are more likely to retain close relationships with their natal kin."
"Over the past several decades, however, marriage patterns have changed markedly. Social, economic, and demographic developments have made marriages between close relatives less common, and the bride price has given way to a dowry system akin to that in the north. Nevertheless, as long as the underlying ethic of marriage in the south remains the reinforcement of existing kinship ties, the relatively favorable situation of southern Indian women is unlikely to be threatened."
Child Marriages
Child marriages keep women subjugated.
A 1976 amendment to the Child Marriage Restraint Act raised the minimum legal age for marriage from 15 to 18 for young women and from 18 to 21 for young men. However, in many rural communities, illegal child marriages are still common. In some rural areas, nearly half the girls between 10 and 14 are married. Because there is pressure on women to prove their fertility by conceiving as soon as possible after marriage, adolescent marriage is synonymous with adolescent childbearing: roughly 10-15 percent of all births take place to women in their teens.
A May 1998 article in the New York Times states:
Child marriages contribute to virtually every social malaise that keeps India behind in women's rights. The problems include soaring birth rates, grinding poverty and malnutrition, high illiteracy and infant mortality and low life expectancy, especially among rural women.
The article cites a 1993 survey of more than 5,000 women in Rajasthan, which showed that 56 percent of them had married before they were 15. Barely 18 percent of them were literate and only 3 percent used any form of birth control other than sterilization. Sixty-three percent of the children under age 4 of these women were severely undernourished.
"Each year, formal warnings are posted outside state government offices stating that child marriages are illegal, but they have little impact."
One man interviewed for the article has seven daughters. He borrowed some 60,000 rupees to pay for the dowries for six of his daughters, ranging in age from 4-14. He reported that "the weddings mean that he can now look forward to growing old without being trapped in the penury by the need to support his daughters." (NYT)
Dowries
Women are kept subordinate, and are even murdered, by the practice of dowry.
In India, 6,000 dowry murders are committed each year. This reality exists even though the Dowry Prohibition Act has been in existence for 33 years, and there are virtually no arrests under the Act. Since those giving as well as those accepting dowry are punishable under the existing law, no one is willing to complain. It is only after a "dowry death" that the complaints become public. It is estimated that the average dowry today is equivalent to five times the family's annual income and that the high cost of weddings and dowries is a major cause of indebtedness among India's poor.
A December 1997 article in India Today, entitled, Victims of Sudden Affluence states, "A woman on fire has made dowry deaths the most vicious of social crimes; it is an evil endemic to the subcontinent but despite every attempt at justice the numbers have continued to climb. With get-rich-quick becoming the new mantra, dowry became the perfect instrument for upward material mobility." A study done by a policy think-tank, the Institute of Development and Communication, states, "the quantum of dowry exchange may still be greater among the upper classes, but 80 percent of dowry deaths and 80 percent of dowry harassment occurs in the middle and lower stratas."
The article goes on to state, "So complete is the discrimination among women that the gender bias is extended even toward the guilty. In a bizarre trend, the onus of murder is often put on the women to protect the men. Sometimes it is by consent. Often, old mothers-in-law embrace all the blame to bail out their sons and husbands."
Despite every stigma, dowry continues to be the signature of marriage. Says Rainuka Dagar, "It is taken as a normative custom and dowry harassment as a part of family life."
Divorce
Divorce is not a viable option.
Divorce is rare - it is a considered a shameful admission of a woman's failure as a wife and daughter-in-law. In 1990, divorced women made up a miniscule 0.08 percent of the total female population.
Maintenance rights of women in the case of divorce are weak. Although both Hindu and Muslim law recognize the rights of women and children to maintenance, in practice, maintenance is rarely set at a sufficient amount and is frequently violated.
Both Hindu and Muslim personal laws fail to recognize matrimonial property. Upon divorce, women have no rights to their home or to other property accumulated during marriage; in effect, their contributions to the maintenance of the family and accumulation of family assets go unrecognized and unrewarded.
Inheritance
Women's rights to inheritance are limited and frequently violated.
In the mid-1950s the Hindu personal laws, which apply to all Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, were overhauled, banning polygamy and giving women rights to inheritance, adoption and divorce. The Muslim personal laws differ considerably from that of the Hindus, and permit polygamy. Despite various laws protecting women's rights, traditional patriarchal attitudes still prevail and are strengthened and perpetuated in the home.
Under Hindu law, sons have an independent share in the ancestral property. However, daughters' shares are based on the share received by their father. Hence, a father can effectively disinherit a daughter by renouncing his share of the ancestral property, but the son will continue to have a share in his own right. Additionally, married daughters, even those facing marital harassment, have no residential rights in the ancestral home.
Even the weak laws protecting women have not been adequately enforced. As a result, in practice, women continue to have little access to land and property, a major source of income and long-term economic security. Under the pretext of preventing fragmentation of agricultural holdings, several states have successfully excluded widows and daughters from inheriting agricultural land.
Women in Public Office (Revised May, 1999)
Panchayat Raj Institutions
The highest national priority must be the unleashing of woman power in governance. That is the single most important source of societal energy that we have kept corked for half a century.
--Mani Shankar Aiyar, journalist, India Today
Through the experience of the Indian Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRI) 1 million women have actively entered political life in India. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts, which guarantee that all local elected bodies reserve one-third of their seats for women, have spearheaded an unprecedented social experiment which is playing itself out in more than 500,000 villages that are home to more than 600 million people. Since the creation of the quota system, local women-the vast majority of them illiterate and poor-have come to occupy as much as 43% of the seats, spurring the election of increasing numbers of women at the district, provincial and national levels. Since the onset of PRI, the percentages of women in various levels of political activity have risen from 4-5% to 25-40%.
According to Indian writer and activist Devaki Jain, "the positive discrimination of PRI has initiated a momentum of change. Women's entry into local government in such large numbers, often more than the required 33.3 %, and their success in campaigning, including the defeat of male candidates, has shattered the myth that women are not interested in politics, and have no time to go to meetings or to undertake all the other work that is required in political party processes...PRI reminds us of a central truth: power is not something people give away. It has to be negotiated, and sometimes wrested from the powerful."
Contrary to fears that the elected women would be rubber stamp leaders, the success stories that have arisen from PRI are impressive. A government-financed study, based on field work in 180 villages in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, and coordinated by the Center for Women's Development Studies in New Delhi, has found that a full two-thirds of elected women leaders are actively engaged in learning the ropes and exercising power. Says Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of UNIFEM, "This is one of the best innovations in grass-roots democracy in the world."
Women leaders in the Panchayati Raj are transforming local governance by sensitizing the State to issues of poverty, inequality and gender injustice. Through the PRI, they are tackling issues that had previously gone virtually unacknowledged, including water, alcohol abuse, education, health and domestic violence. According to Sudha Murali, UNICEF Communications Officer in Andhra Pradesh, women are seeing this power as a chance for a real change for them and for their children and are using it to demand basic facilities like primary schools and health care centres.
The PRI has also brought about significant transformations in the lives of women themselves, who have become empowered, and have gained self-confidence, political awareness and affirmation of their own identity. The panchayat villages have become political training grounds to women, many of them illiterate, who are now leaders in the village panchayats. Says Sudha Pillai, joint secretary in India's Ministry for Rural Development, "It has given something to people who were absolute nobodies and had no way of making it on their own. Power has become the source of their growth."
By asserting control over resources and officials and by challenging men, women are discovering a personal and collective power that was previously unimaginable. This includes women who are not themselves panchayat leaders, but who have been inspired by the work of their sisters; "We will not bear it," says one woman. Once we acquire some position and power, we will fight it out...The fact that the Panchayats will have a minimum number of women [will be used] for mobilizing women at large." It is this critical mass of unified and empowered women which will push forward policies that enforce gender equity into the future.
An observation by Deepak Tiwari in This Week, India's No.1 Weekly News Magazine, displays the promising future made possible by the PRI. He notes, "'Learning politics' is the latest fad for young village girls, who dream of joining the growing band of women panchayat representatives, 164,060 at last count, in the state."
Conclusion
As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has stated, "Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance."
This recognition is currently missing in India. Transforming the prevailing social discrimination against women must become the top priority, and must happen concurrently with increased direct action to rapidly improve the social and economic status of women. In this way, a synergy of progress can be achieved.
As women receive greater education and training, they will earn more money.
As women earn more money - as has been repeatedly shown - they spend it in the further education and health of their children, as opposed to men, who often spend it on drink, tobacco or other women.
As women rise in economic status, they will gain greater social standing in the household and the village, and will have greater voice.
As women gain influence and consciousness, they will make stronger claims to their entitlements - gaining further training, better access to credit and higher incomes - and command attention of police and courts when attacked.
As women's economic power grows, it will be easier to overcome the tradition of "son preference" and thus put an end to the evil of dowry.
As son preference declines and acceptance of violence declines, families will be more likely to educate their daughters, and age of marriage will rise.
For every year beyond 4th grade that girls go to school, family size shrinks 20%, child deaths drop 10% and wages rise 20%.
As women are better nourished and marry later, they will be healthier, more productive, and will give birth to healthier babies.
Only through action to remedy discrimination against women can the vision of India's independence - an India where all people have the chance to live health and productive lives - be realized.
Bibliography
Abzug, Bella., and Davis, Susan. 1998. "India." Mapping Progress: Assessing Implementation of the Beijing Platform.
Bunch, Charlotte. "The Intolerable Status Quo: Violence Against Women and Girls." The Progress of Nations 1997 New York: UNICEF
Burns, John F. "Though Illegal, Child Marriage is Popular in Part of India." The New York Times. May 11, 1998.
Carr, Marilyn., and Chen, Martha., and Jhabvala, Renana. 1996. Speaking Out: Women's Economic Empowerment in South Asia. Southampton Row, London: Intermediate Technology Publications LTD.
Desai, Sonalde. 1994. Gender Inequalities and Demographic Behavior: India. New York: The Population Council, Inc.
Neft, Naomi., and Levine, Ann D. 1997. Where Women Stand: An International Report on the Status of Women in 140 Countries. New York: Random House.
Omvedt, Gail. 1990. "Violence Against Women: New Movements and New Theories in India." Kali Primaries.
Purushothaman, Sangeetha. 1998. The Empowerment of Women in India: Grassroots Women's Networks and the State. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Rajan. "Will India's Ban on Prenatal Sex Determination Slow Abortion of Girls?" Internet.
Ramalingaswami, Vulimiri., and Jonsson, Urban., and Rohde, Jon. "The Asian Enigma." The Progress of Nations. 1996 New York: UNICEF
Reardon, Geraldine. 1995. Power and Process. Oxford: Oxfam
Times of India. "Protest Against Atrocities in Women." Internet. p.3
Tinker, Anne. 1996. Improving Women's Health in India. Development in Practice Series. The World Bank
Venkateswaran, Sandhya. 1995. Environment, Development and the Gender Gap. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Vinayak, Ramesh "Victims of Sudden Affluence." India Today. December 15, 1997
Current Status of Women in India
According India's constitution, women are legal citizens of the country and have equal rights with men (Indian Parliament). Because of lack of acceptance from the male dominant society, Indian women suffer immensely. Women are responsible for baring children, yet they are malnourished and in poor health. Women are also overworked in the field and complete the all of the domestic work. Most Indian women are uneducated. Although the country's constitution says women have equal status to men, women are powerless and are mistreated inside and outside the home.
India is a society where the male is greatly revered. Therefore women, especially the young girls, get very little respect and standing in this country. The women of the household are required to prepare the meal for the men, who eat most of the food. Only after the males are finished eating, can the females eat. Typically the leftover food is meager, considering the families are poor and have little to begin with. This creates a major problem with malnutrition, especially for pregnant or nursing women. Very few women seek medical care while pregnant because it is thought of as a temporary condition. This is one main reason why India's maternal and infant mortality rates are so high. Starting from birth, girls do not receive as much care and commitment from their parents and society as a boy would. For example a new baby girl would only be breast fed for a short period of time, barely supplying her with the nutrients she needs. This is so that the mother can get pregnant as soon as possible in hopes of a son the next time (Coonrod).
Even though the constitution guarantees free primary schooling to everyone up to 14 years of age (Indian Parliament), very few females attend school. Only about 39 percent of all women in India actually attend primary schools. There are several reasons why families choose not to educate their daughters. One reason is that parents get nothing in return for educating their daughters. Another reason is that all the females in a household have the responsibility of the housework. So even though education does not financially burden the family, it costs them the time she spends at school when she could be doing chores. In addition, even if a woman is educated, especially in the poorer regions, there is no hope for a job. Most jobs women perform are agricultural or domestic which do not require a formal education. Another reason girls are not educated is because families are required to supply a chaste daughter to the family of her future husband. With over two-thirds of teachers in India being men and students predominately male, putting daughters in school, where males surround them all day could pose a possible threat to their virginity (Coonrod).
Because women are not educated and cannot hold a prestigious job, they take on the most physically difficult and undesirable jobs. A typical day for a woman in an agricultural position lasts from 4am to 8pm with only an hour break in the middle. Compared to a man's day, which is from 5am to 10am and then from 3pm to 5pm. Most women are overworked with no maternity leave or special breaks for those who are pregnant. Plus women do the majority of the manual labor that uses a lot of energy compared to the men who do mostly machine operating (Coonrod). Even though women work twice as many hours as men, the men say that "women eat food and do nothing." This is mainly because the work the women perform does not require a lot of skill and are smaller tasks.
Combat Law, Issue #3 : The Right to Food
Combat Law, Issue 3 - I was in Jaipur for a meeting organised by Kavita Shrivastav of the People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), unconnected with starvation deaths, where I met Jean Dreze, a professor of economics at Delhi. He suggested that I visit a village nearby to see the extent of hunger in the countryside. An hour's drive from Jaipur and we were in another world -that of the dispossesed. People had no food at all and fluoride in the well-water had prematurely aged the youth.
Miles away were the godowns of the Food Corporation of India (FCI) - full of grain, some of it rotting and a feast for rats. This is the spectre of starving India.
In December 2000, the Union Minister for Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution wrote to all chief ministers admitting that five crore people are victims of starvation. A few days later, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan complained to him that he had heard that lakhs of tonnes of food grains were lying in the godowns of the FCI and that there was a proposal to dump it in the sea, to make storage space for the next crop. When Manoj Parida, Senior Regional Manager of the FCI, was interviewed on the Star TV news channel, he said that he could only give the grain to the states if the central government allocated it, and that his dilemma was that he couldn't just throw it away!
In 1988, in the case of Kishen Patnaik, when starvation deaths were brought to the notice of the Apex Court, the court accepted the assurances of the Government of Orissa that the situation would be looked into, and hoped that starvation deaths would cease. Ten years later, another petition was filed, detailing hundreds of starvation deaths. In 2001, when Kavita Srivastava of the People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), Rajasthan, filed a petition, the condition of the people had not changed.
No will to Act
Why is it that with 60 million tonnes of grain in surplus of the buffer stock, India still has hunger on this scale? Why are half of India's children malnourished? No answer. Shanta Kumar, the minister responsible, remains unruffled despite widespread condemnation. And the Prime Minister appeared on television recently to say that the reports of starvation deaths are false and politically motivated. All this in a situation where it has been calculated that it is cheaper to give grain away free to the poor than to transport and store it! A compassionate court would have none of that. It found it incomprehensible that a litigant would have to move the highest court merely for a direction to government to implement its own schemes.
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"Cut the flab somewhere else", said the Court when confronted with the argument that the states had no funds to feed hungry children. From The Ratlam Municipality v. Virdichand (AIR 1980 SC 1622) onwards, the Apex Court has held that when it comes to the enforcement of a fundamental right, courts will not entertain the argument of financial incapacity. Hunger spreads not because the State lacks the funds to act but it chooses to use its money elsewhere in what V. R. Krishna Iyer once called "a perverse expenditure logic". A second aircraft carrier for the Navy, to be purchased soon, will cost a thousand crore, an amount that could feed all of this nation's children. But macho muscle flexing is more important than that! And we have examples of ostentation such as the foreign trip of the Vice President of India, Krishna Kant, and his family, at the State's expense. Schemes in disarray
The British evolved a Famine Code which ensured that anyone needing food in a famine area had only to turn up at a work site - a road, a school building, a watershed management programme - to get work. At the end of the day, she would get half of her wages in grain. Famine records show that the prompt implementation of food for work programmes reduced hunger and prevented starvation deaths. For those unable to work - the old, infirm and disabled - there was a dole of fifty paise per day.
Fifty years after Independence, this Famine Code is in disuse and the elaborate procedure laid down for tackling famines disregarded. The watered-down remedy - the Employment Assurance Scheme - provided for employment for two family members on food for work projects for 100 days in a year. This was never implemented. And recently, the Prime Minister announced from the Red Fort that the scheme was being upgraded and renamed the Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana. This 'upgraded' scheme provided work for only ten days in a year!
The ration card system, the only mechanism in place to feed the poor, is in disarray. In India's capital, the identification of Below Poverty Line (BPL) families started after the court case and there were many complaints of corruption in the issuing of forms.
The Midday Meal Scheme, introduced as far back as 1995 and requiring a cooked meal to be given to all children in government and government-assisted schools, was implemented fully only in Tamilnadu. The Delhi government only gave a few biscuits to its schoolchildren. The Annapoorna Scheme, which provides grain to the poorest of the poor at Rs. 2 per kg was also not implemented. The beneficiaries of the National Old Age Pension Scheme usually received their pensions six months late if at all.
No wonder that the Comptroller & Auditor General, in his Year 2000 Report, found significant systematic weaknesses in the fair price shop system. He found the reports of employment generated not genuine. The Employment Assurance Scheme, which promised a hundred days of food for work, in practice provided only nine days of work. Scarce resources were lost in the labyrinth of a slothful administrative system. The report found one-fifth of rural households facing the prospect of hunger. Forty percent of all households did not get two square meals a day. Concluding, the Computer & Auditor General found serious flaws in design, execution and monitoring of the schemes.
A study conducted by the Tata Economic Consultancy Services found a large number of bogus ration shops, and 30 per cent of the grain being diverted.
Supreme Court Orders
The court directed that the targeted public distribution system be fully implemented by January 2002 and that all governments complete their identification of BPL families, issue ration cards and distribute 25 kg of grain per family per month by that date.
A similar order was passed for the Antyodaya Anna Yojana scheme, under which the poorest of the poor get grain at Rs. 2 per kg. The Supreme Court directed that the governments should consider giving the grain free to people who are too poor to buy it. It directed governments to provide a cooked midday meal in all government and government-assisted schools. It directed governments to implement the National Old Age Pension Scheme fully by January 2002 and to make payments of pension by the seventh of each month.
Similarly directions were made in respect of the Annapoorna Scheme, the Integrated Child Development Scheme, the National Maternity Benefit Scheme and the National Family Benefit Scheme.
The last order is dated 8.5.02. In this order the gram panchayats have been empowered to frame the Food-for-Work schemes, wherein special emphasis is to be given for the poor, women and dalits. Contractors are prohibited. The gram sabhas are also empowered to conduct a social audit of all the food and employment schemes and to report instances of misuse of funds. On such reports being made, the authorities are required to punish the guilty.
The gram sabhas are also empowered to monitor the implementation of the various schemes and to have access to relevant information as to how beneficiaries are selected and how benefits are disbursed. A grievance redressal procedure is set out in this order. Complaints of non implementation of the Supreme Court's order is to be made to the CEO / Collector and these complaints are to be acknowledged with a receipt. Ultimately, it is the Chief Secretary who is made responsible. Dr. N.C. Saxena, former Planning Secretary and Mr. S.R. Shankaran, former Secretary, Rural Development have been appointed as commissioners of the Supreme Court for the purpose of looking into people's grievances. The Supreme Court has also directed government to frame clear guidelines for the proper identification of BPL families as there were complaints that this criteria is neither clear nor uniform. Ration shops have been directed to remain open throughout the month during fixed hours, the details of which should be displayed on notice board.
Transparency
Most officials do not know of the schemes in their own jurisdiction. There is no way for people in a village to know what schemes they are entitled to. The order of the Court in the Rajasthan PUCL case will hopefully change the situation for the better. A translated copy of the Supreme Court order and the list of the beneficiaries of each scheme are to be displayed on every gram panchayat notice board and in schools. Doordarshan and AIR are to publicise the schemes.
All said and done, even with the Apex Court order, the level of compliance will go up to, say, 35 per cent. Hunger will remain institutionalised. As along as priorities do not change, half of India's population will be kept deliberately hungry by State policy. Only a revolution can change that. Madhura Swaminathan in her recent publication Weakening Welfare has studied the Public Distribution System (PDS) in India. Noticing that food deprivation and insecurity persists on a mass scale, she concludes that this situation of mass deprivation is likely to worsen in the current context of "liberalisation, structural adjustment and the weakening of welfare systems". She argues that there is need to expand and strengthen - not undermine or disband the PDS system. She has identified 'targeting' as a dangerous policy introduced as a mechanism to ultimately close down the PDS. This part of the article is largely taken from her book.
History of Public Distribution System
- 1964: FCI set up a sole central agency for procurement, storage, transportation and distribution of food commodities viz. rice, wheat, sugar, edible oils, kerosene and coal.
- 1964-1978:Drought of 1965/67 and 1972 / 73 provided strong impetus for the expansion of PDS.
- 1978-1991: Food grain distribution through PDS peaked in 1991 at 20.8 MT.
- 1991 onwards: Food grain distributed through PDS falls substantially to 14 MT in 1994. Stocks accumulate. Between 1991 and 1994 PDS process double. The poor are priced out. Sales drop. Stocks build up. At this point because global prices are temporarily high export taken place at the cost of nutrition in India.
- 1997: Targetting introduced. Between 1998 and 2001: APL prices were increased 85% (wheat) and 61% (rice) and BPL prices by 66% and 62% respectively.
The Spectre of Mass Hunger
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The National Sample Survey data, shows that per capita consumption of cereals declined in every state except Kerala in both urban and rural areas. A shift is noticed from cereals to other food items of lesser nutrition among the poor. This exacerbates undernourishment. Nutritional surveys done by the National Nutrition Monitoring Board confirms this inadequacy of food (and cereal) intake by large parts of the population is below the recommended intake of 460 grams. Referring to "hidden hunger" it found an inadequate intake of micronutrients, which play a critical role in body functioning. The National Sample Survey Organisation found in 17 of India's most populous states that the average caloric intake declined between 1972 and 1994. The decline was particularly sharp in rural areas. At the all-India level total calories per head in rural areas has fallen on 2149 by 1999-2000 compared to 2211 in 1983, a decline by 72 calories per head. This level of 2149 calories per head in 1999 - 2000 is substantially lower than China or Brazil's level of 2757 calories and 2797 calories in 1993. It is also lower than Tanzania or Kenya's level of 1980. A commonly used indicator of undernourishment is Body Mass Index (BMI). This is the ratio of weight (kg) to the square of height (m). 18.5 is normal. Using this indicator, Shetty and James found 46% of persons chronically deficient in 1991-1992. Severe undernourishment was observed among 9%. In other words one half of the population in the country is malnourished. Of these 53% of children were found to be undernourished and 21% severally undernourished.
Poverty Line Excludes Many Hungry Persons
The original standard for the definition of the poor was thrice the food expenditure as it was shown that poor families spend 1/3 of their expenditure on food. Any household that spends more than 1/3 of its income on food is considered poor in the United States and eligible for food stamps. If this standard is used in India 95% of all households would be considered poor. If one uses the China standard of food share of 60%, then 80% of the rural population and 60% of the urban population would be poor. Thus in India, the top 20% of the population can be excluded from systems of food security.
When there is mass hunger the weight attached to every undernourished person who is wrongly excluded should be much higher than the weight attached to a rich person who benefits from the scheme. The conclusion drawn by Swaminathan is that the proportion of persons suffering deprivations in food and nutrition is higher than those below the poverty line. For example 37% of urban household were BPL in 1993-94 while 80% of households were calorie deficit.
If the objective of PDS is food security then it should also look at those facing the risk of undernourishment. While anthropometric measures suggest 50% adults are undernourished, 70% of households are deficient in food consumption.
Decline in Per Capita Offtake
There are sharp regional variations in total and per capita offtake. Some of the southern states, Andhra Pradesh,Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, accounted for almost one half of the PDS offtake of grain in the country. By contrast the four northern states Bihar, Madhya Pradesh , Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh accounted for only 10% in 1995. Kerala was undoubtably the leader with a fair system of public delivery. The average per capita offtake was 53.3 kg. per year as compared to 2.3 kg. in Bihar and 4.6 in Madhya Pradesh.
The most striking feature of immediate post structural adjustment (1991-1995) was the widerspread decline in per capita offtake. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in 1987, 98% of the rural population did not purchase any grain from PDS. In Kerala by contrast, 87% of the population purchased grain from PDS. The data indicated that PDS was not serving the vast majority of the country's population and that there was a near total collapse of the PDS system in Bihar and some northern states.
Corruption and Maladministration
In Thane district in Maharashtra, Swaminathan found that ration cards of scheduled tribes showed full offtake though the tribes had not purchased food from the ration shops. Other researches have found bogus ration cards, poor quality grains and short weighing of foods. Researchers have estimated that only 17% of the wheat lifted from the FCI by the state governments reaches the final consumer in Bihar! Insufficient supply of grains was the most important reason given for not using PDS. 40% did not buy grain because there was none to be bought.
Targets, Food stamps and other rackets: Sabotaging the PDS In recent times advisors to the G.O.I. and the World Bank have suggested a shift from PDS to a system of food stamps or coupons. Such advice generally ignores not only the experience of other countries but also the inherent difficulties in implementing such a system. Swaminathan points out that a food stamp system entails extensive book keeping, revalidating of coupons and the possibility of fraud by the counterfeiting of coupons.
Two major moves were made by government of India to sabotage the PDS system; in all probability with the nudging of the WB and the IMF. The first came in 1992 with the Revamped PDS (RPDS) and the second in 1997 with Targetted PDS (TPDS). This comes together with another major policy shift in the 1990's away from the agricultural strategy of self sufficiency in food grains production.
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One way of weakening the PDS in the early 1990's was by repeatedly raising the price in the PDS shops. These prices were increased to such an extent that the cumulative price increase of food grains in the PDS shops was higher than the rise in the general price index. Coupled with this, government sharply reduced the supply of food grains to the PDS since 1991. Thus from 1991-1998 there was a fall in per capita offtake. Revamped PDS involved tagretting specific areas such as drought prone, desert, tribal, hilly and urban slum areas. Targetted PDS used the poverty line to demarcate poor and non poor. This system was so arbitrary and irrational that it resulted in large numbers of poor persons being excluded. There was no method at all to determine whether the family fell below the poverty line. The income criteria was not followed in most states and particularly in the rural areas as, following the started income criterion would result in 90% of households falling below the poverty line. Reports from many rural areas indicated households were classified as falling below the poverty line on the basis of visual inspection as to whether the household had a tiled roof or a mud floor. In many tribal areas poor families were excluded if they stated that they ate meat! Swaminathan's study of the revamped and targetted PDS found that entitlements were lower in the revamped PDS areas than under general PDS. She found that retail prices in PDS shops in Maharashtra were the highest in the country and rising faster than at the national level. As a result quantities of grain sold were falling since 1991. Targetting had replaced the per capita norm by the family norm. Using the poverty line resulted in misidentification of households and mistargetting. Moghe in his study of Maharashtra found that when targetted PDS was announced there were 60 lakhs households, according to the central government, eligible for BPL category. The state restricted this number to 43 lakhs.
In slums, households were classified as BPL or APL on the basis of a few queries resulting in absurdly low numbers. In Dharavi, Asia's largest slum with a population of 0.5 million, the Rationing Control Officer identified only 365 BPL families in 1997 and after 're-checks' the number fell to 151 in 1999!
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The World Bank has recommended that PDS be targetted to the "very poor" and that a distinction be drawn between the "very poor" and the "moderately poor" to improve transfer of food to the "ultra poor". The very poor are defined as households that have expenditure less than 3/4 the BPL expenditures. The remaining 1/4 are defined as moderately poor. In short, an extremely narrow form of targetting is being propagated to groups within the poor. This, Swaminathan concludes, is most undesirable. What we need is a system of near universal provision. At most the top 20% of the population can be excluded. When there is targetting especially with a low income cut-off, errors in measurements can mean disqualification for a genuinely poor person. Secondly, there is an incentive to cheat. Thirdly, time specific cut-offs make little sense when there is downward income mobility. Gaiha in his 1987 study found that 13% of the non poor in 1968 had become poor in 1970.
Planned Destruction of India's Agricultural Production
Usa Patnaik has written on this issue. In this part of the article we rely on her inputs. Food grain output dropped sharply to 1.66% (1999-2000) compared to 3.54% for the previous decade. There was a decline of 8 million ha in the area sown to food grains. The sharp cut back in government rural development expenditures reduced growth in rural employment to only 0.6% (1993-1999) as compared to 2% (1987-1993).
Surplus production of a few 'advanced countries' accounts for 4/5 of the global trade in cereals. These countries have focussed their attention on the markets of the 'developing world'. To penetrate these economies and attack their agricultural production systems, the advanced countries ensured that their export of grain would be at very low prices so as to make local prices appear exorbitant. One of the ways in which the prices were kept artificially low was by the grant of large subsidies to the farming sector including grants to agro - business corporations.
During 1980 to 1986, for example, cereal prices fell by one-fourth; the US increased the Producer Subsidy Equivalent (PSE) as a % of total value of agricultural output from 9% to an astronomical 45%. European countries followed suit. Ten European countries raised the PSE to agricultural output percentage from 25 to 66 while Japan raised it from 71 to 93. These highly inflated susbsidy levels of the mid-Eighties were then deliberately made the base from which a mere one fifth cut was undertaken by advanced countries in the Agreement on Agricultural of GATT in 1994.
There is another indicator of farm subsidies. It is called the "Total Support Estimate (TSE)". This is the figure of total support to farmers. The USA which had reduced its TSE to 34% of it value of agricultural production by 1997, raised it by 51% in 1991 and then hugely in 2002 thus transferring between 71 to 96 billion dollars between 1997 and 1999 to the farm sector. There is a Farm Bill before the US Congress proposing to pay additional subsidies of 73.5 billion over the next 10 years. Similarly, the 24 OECD countries including Japan increased their TSE from 46.5% in 1997 to 59.4% by 1999.
As a result, the global prices of major staples like rice, wheat and maize have been halved and developing countries where protection has been removed have become vulnerable.
The proponents of globalisation thus have double standards. While massively subsidising their farm sector including massive agro- corporations, the argument is simultaneously made in the developing world for subsidies to be removed! Advanced countries have through incessant pressure applied succeeded in getting quantitative restrictions removed fully, years before the mandatory date. They are now pushing for the winding up of the PDS. Thus opening up to free trade in agriculture is taking place at the worst possible time when global food prices have been crashing. After grain inputs for Eastern Europe and CIS countries declined sharply in the early 1990's, the USA turned its attention to penetrating South East Asian countries using the familiar rhetoric that all subsidies were bad. The Philippines, for example, gave up its functioning grain procurement and distribution system and became a net importer of US grain.
Suicides
In India, liberalised trade policies have resulted in massive losses for farmers. Farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and other states have been devastated. Many have committed suicide. Cotton farmers have been killing themselves since 1998. In the first month of 2002 over 25 new cases of suicide were reported from Andhra Pradesh. Many have resorted to selling body parts such as kidneys. Recovery proceedings have resulted in the taking away of land, houses, farming tools and equipment and even household articles including utensils!
Swaminathan has demolished the myth that the 'burden' of food subsidies is too high, pointing out that food subsidy as a percentage of GDP has remained unchanged over the last 31 years at 0.31% of GDP. This compares favourably with Sri Lanka (1.3% in 1984), Mexico (0.63% in 1984) and Tunisia (2% in 1993).
Kerala leads the way
According to Swaminathan, the Kerala experience shows that with political commitment food security can be obtained. The establishment of an effective PDS system in Kerala was the outcome of a strong people's movement for food. As a result the coverage is almost universal. In 1996, 95% of households were covered. The poor depend on and use PDS more than the rich. The functioning and delivery system is better than in other states.
Colin Gonsalves
August - September 2002
Colin Gonsalves is an advocate practising in the Supreme Court of India and one of the Joint Editors of Combat Law.
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Govt no to all-women literacy mission
Name to be changed to ensure gender equality
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, June 27
The government is all set to rest the apprehensions created by President Pratibha Patil's announcement of recasting the National Literacy Mission as a National Mission for Female Literacy.
Caught on the wrong foot for its "women-exclusive" and "gender-biased" literacy agenda, the Human Resource Development Ministry seems to have made up its mind to take the men on board. The stormy first national consultation on the issue held in the capital last week revealed the first bout of reservation the community had to the idea of an all-women's literacy mission in times when 25 per cent men were still illiterate; more so, when men continue to dictate women's choices in most of the cultural settings.
In the first indication that the government could actively reconsider changing the title of the mission announced by the President on June 4, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal said recasting of the NLM would take into account the role and participation of men. "The mission will take the men along, but will have a special focus on women," he said.
The change in the national literacy agenda is one of the items on Sibal's 100-day agenda, announced in the capital two days ago. The minister's assurance to males came after educationists and community representatives registered strong protests to the UPA's announcement of reshaping the existing mission as a national mission for female literacy.
Participants in the first national consultation, held recently to secure inputs for the new mission document, said the country could ill-afford to neglect men when talking female literacy. Most of the delegates were worried that an exclusive mission for female literacy could result in shifting financial resources away from programmes dedicated for male literacy.
They favoured the continuation of the National Literacy Mission, with an appendage - "special focus on women". That's precisely what Kapil Sibal also hinted when he rolled his 100-day agenda in the capital the other day.
PUCL Bulletin, August 2004
Women's Reservation Bill - A critique
-- By Aysha Sumbul
The real test of democracy is the creation of equality of opportunity for the hitherto deprived sections of society. It requires both a favourable social atmosphere and an individual attitude. Individual attitude and social atmosphere is a sort of reversible equation: one influences the other, in both directions. In practical terms it means that efforts have to be made at various levels of society simultaneously. Every attempt, in every direction, is bound to affect adversely some vested interests. So, one has to be prepared for a long drawn out struggle on all the fronts. Democracy in kitchen and bedroom goes hand in hand with democracy in Parliament and Panchayat. It has to become a way of life; it has to be adopted in literary vocabulary and in political discourse alike.
In the context of the present discussion it amounts to shedding of all mental reservations against reservation of seats for women in the Parliament and in Assemblies.
The idea of making a legal provision for reserving seats for women in the Parliament and State Assemblies came into being during Rajeev Gandhi's tenure as the Prime Minister of India when the Panchayati Raj Act, 1992 (73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment) came into effect granting not less then 33% reservation to women in the Panchayati Raj Institutions or local bodies. Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda made the actual promise for reservation of seats for women in Parliament and State Assemblies in 1996. I.K. Gujral proposed the present form and shape of the Bill during his term as the Prime Minister of India.
The Bill in its Current form envisages reserving 181 seats in the Parliament for women. In practical terms its efforts would be that 181 male members of Parliament would not be able to contest elections if the Bill is passed. Also, there is to be a rotation of seats, i.e., a male member of Parliament can not represent the same constituency for more then two consecutive terms. Here lies the rub.
These two very provisions are seemingly the cause of the consensus arrived at by various political parties to dump the Bill. 181 seats in Parliament is too great a number to be sacrificed for the mere ideal of women's empowerment or adequate political representation, the very idea makes the male politicians panicky. The clause of 'rotation of seats' is seen by the opponents of Bill to 'strike at the very heart of democracy and democratic values' as, according to their logic, the representative will not get a chance to nurture his constituency nor the electorate will get a chance to reward or punish their representative, as a corollary to it hardly any ties would be established between the two.
This argument may hold water when it is discussed in classroom sessions but it cannot be taken as the sole basis to discard Women's Reservation Bill altogether. Securing 33% reservation for women in opening the doors of opportunity for political empowerment to almost 50% of our population. It will not only serve the cause of democracy as the Panchayati Raj Institutions are doing at the grassroots level but will also go a long way in ensuring political equality through active participation of woman from both urban and rural areas. Also, if social equality through political empowerment is to be achieved the, Bill should include clauses which guarantee quota within quota to women belonging to scheduled tribes, scheduled castes, other backward castes, and minority communities so that a level playing field is provided for them as well.
It is also argued that the Bill in its present form would end up ensuring seats in Parliament for the female relatives of those who are already in power. To counter this situation, provisions can be added in the Bill, which provides for no reservation to women who have close relatives in active politics (An acceptable definition of 'close relatives' can easily be arrived at.) These women can contest from general seats. There had been suggestions in the past in the form of alternatives to the Bill. One is to amend the Representation of People's Act 1951, to compel political parties to nominate women for one-third of their seats or lose recognition. This, according to Rajindar Sachar, former Chief Justice of Delhi, is flawed, as it would violate the Constitution of India, which guarantees its citizens the right to form association under Article 19(1)(c) as a fundamental right. Another alternative is to increase the number of seats in the Lok Sabha, which is currently based on the figures of the census of India, 1971, when the population of India was 54 crores. The numbers of seats were limited to 530 till further amendments. Now the Delimitation Commission has been asked to take the 2001 census as the basis for delimiting constituencies. According to 2001 census, the population of India has risen to 102 crores, therefore the number of seats are bound to increase before the next general elections. This should be reason enough to pave the way for the safe passage of the Women's Reservation Bill.
Moreover, when the so called backward and fundamentalist society like Pakistan can grant 33% reservation to women in its Senate then why should India, the largest democracy in the world, lag behind.
Evaluation office to keep tabs on key policies soon
Anita Katyal
Our Political Correspondent
New Delhi, June 27
When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told his Cabinet colleagues recently that "equity, innovation and public accountability must be the watchword of our government", he meant every word of it.
The UPA government is currently fine-tuning a policy which will make it mandatory for all officials to specifically demonstrate that every new programme they want approved includes fresh innovative ideas, has an element of public accountablity built into it and is inclusive in nature. Any project proposal which fails to meet this requirement will not be considered.
The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) will show the way in accountability by setting up an independent evaluation office for monitoring the government's flagship programmes like the Bharat Nirman and the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme.
A draft proposal on the new policy has been prepared and is currently being vetted by Cabinet secretary KM Chandrasekhar, who is expected to unveil it within the next couple of weeks.
Bureaucrats are known to be set in their ways and are averse to any change. The Prime Minister, who is well-versed with the functioning of the bureaucracy, apparently wants to shake up babudom and push officials into changing their mindsets. UPA sources explained this radical policy, once implemented, will force officials to switch gears and think differently.
"Each time an official draws up a proposal for a new scheme, he will necessarily have to show how it benefits the marginalised sections of society..he will be forced to think of the other half," remarked a UPA minister, adding that this is in consonance with this government's emphasis on ensuring that the fruits of development percolate down to the rural poor, minorities, women and all disadvantaged sections of society.
It was clarified that not all proposals will necessarily need to meet these requirements, stating that this new yardstick will particularly be applicable to social sector and economic programmes.
UPA sources said the government's second term will focus primarily on social sector reforms and improving governance since the scope for moving any further with economic reforms is very limited at this stage. Pointing to the government's priorities as listed in the President's address to parliamentarians last month, senior government officials said the emphasis is now on improving delivery systems through administrative reforms and liberating education and health sectors which are presently over-regulated.
"Just as we did away with the licence-permit raj in the economic field , we need to do the same in the education and health sectors which are regulated by a host of bodies like the University Grants Commission, Medical Council of India and so on," a UPA minister explained, adding that a beginning in this regard has been made by new Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal.
Similarly, the government wants to usher in radical changes in governance by restructuring the upper echelons of the government and bringing in greater accountability through a public data policy which provides for the placement of all information in the public domain.
Amartya Sen's story of justice
| n an exclusive interview with The Times of India, the Nobel laureate speaks about his most ambitious
Who is this book for? Academics who study justice? Philosophers who explore justice? Legislators who create the system that doles out justice? The layperson who thinks about justice? It is a book on philosophy, but it is meant for everyone. I agree with Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian political leader, that philosophy is not "a strange and difficult thing", but all the things we reason about. Of course I hope there will be some academic interest from professional philosophers, and that those concerned with policy issues will also take an interest. But the idea of justice interests us all. The Idea of Justice has been described as your most ambitious book yet, but will you accept that its length, subject and style could limit its reach? The reach of our ideas is always limited to some extent, and if there is some ambition in the book, it lies in my refusal to give up, without a serious effort, trying to communicate with others. In writing about any difficult but important problem, we have to try to catch the complexities involved without making our arguments obtuse, perplexing or inaccessible. I believe it is easy to underestimate the breadth and reach of the interests of the general public. There is a kind of vanity of the self-defined "intellectuals" who bend down to talk to "common people". (It is, by the way, very bad for the intellectual's back to do so much bending down!) Since some of the most insightful comments I have received throughout my long life have come from very young students and sometimes even from unknown neighbours in a train (mostly in India — British passengers don't like talking to strangers), I have reason to be optimistic about the interest, involvement and engagement of others. Has the concept of justice in this century come only to mean human rights? This is a very interesting question. The idea of human rights is much used in practice, and is very powerfully invoked by activists these days, often with admirable effect. However, the critics of the approach of human rights argue that the idea of such non-legal rights is lacking in foundation. A frequently asked question is: where do human rights come from and what gives them force? One of the aims of the book is to show in what sense - and in what way - human rights have a strong foundation through public reasoning, and how that foundation relates also to the basic analysis of social justice, which too is very dependent on the opportunity of public discussion. It is not so much that the concept of justice "has come only to mean human rights," but that the two related ideas have to be considered together. It is also important to remember that the idea of human rights has been in use, often in very informal ways and frequently without being called human rights, for a very long time in world history - not just in the 20th and 21st centuries. For example, Ashoka's discussion of everyone's right to speak and to be heard by others, or Akbar's championing of the right to religious freedom, belongs to the subject matter of what is now called human rights. And they also relate to Ashoka's and Akbar's conceptions of social justice. At the risk of forcing you to reduce 496 pages to a few sentences, what is justice? What should it be for us here? Justice is a complex idea (I was not surprised that it took me 496 pages to discuss it), but it is very important to understand that justice has much to do with everyone being treated fairly. Even though that connection has been well discussed by the leading political philosopher of our time, John Rawls, I have argued that he neglects a couple of important connections. One neglect is the central recognition that a theory of justice has to be deeply concerned with systematic assessment of how to reduce injustice in the world, rather than only with the identification of what a hypothetical "perfectly just society" would look like. There may be no agreement on the shape of perfect justice (and also perfect justice will hardly be achievable even if people did agree about what would be immaculately just), but we can still have reasoned agreement on many removable cases of manifest injustice, for example, slavery, or subjugation of women, or widespread hunger and deprivation, or the lack of schooling of children, or absence of available and affordable health care. Second, analysis of justice has to pay attention to the lives that people are actually able to lead, rather than exclusively concentrating only on the nature of "just institutions". In India, as anywhere else, we have to concentrate on removing injustices that are identifiable and that can be remedied. Is justice essential for democracy to flourish? One of the main arguments of the book is the role of open public discussion for our understanding of the demands of justice, and particularly of the removal of injustice. Indeed, democracy can be seen as "government by discussion" (an approach made famous by John Stuart Mill), and the pursuit of justice can be much enhanced by good democratic practice - not just well-fought elections but also open and well-aimed public discussion, with a free and vigorous media. In an earlier book, I discussed a remark of a very poor and nearly illiterate peasant, who lived in a village close to Santiniketan (where I come from). "It is not difficult to silence us," he said, "but this is not because we cannot speak." In that quiet confidence there are reasons of hope for the future of justice and democracy in India. Lord Meghnad Desai once said that you "prefer to be subversive in a technical way". Might he have meant that you are not a 'doer' but seek change through technical argument? Do you see yourself as an activist? I see myself as an activist - through writing, speaking and arguing. I've done my share of demonstrations when I was young, when I was a student in Calcutta. Do I believe that causes that activists take up could be helped by reasoning? Yes. But perhaps Meghnad's comment about my being subversive in a technical way relates to the fact that I don't take the view that technical or mathematical arguments are useless and distractive. I still don't know why I was given the Nobel Prize, but whether that was deserved or not, the works of mine they cited were all quite technical - many of them also mathematical. If I could just get you to comment on an unfolding matter here. Would it be just to give Ajmal Kasab the death penalty? We're often criticized for continuing with capital punishment. I'm opposed to the death penalty in general and wouldn't want it given to Ajmal Kasab or anyone else. But this, of course, is not a subject matter of my book - it is not an engineer's handbook. I do discuss the need for prevailing practices, including capital punishment, to be scrutinized by public reasoning, and note the fact that capital punishment is most used in countries with relatively little public discussion, the three biggest users being China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Next comes the US, and I discuss why I disagree with those judges in the US Supreme Court who think that arguments coming from elsewhere (like Europe) are of no relevance in America. Is justice culturally specific? No, because there is an obligation to engage in argument no matter where it comes from - far or near. | |||
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PUCL Bulletin, July 2003
Women's reservation bill - A social necessity, national obligation
-- By Rajindar Sachar
History does not repeat itself is a self-evident maxim which most people tend to accept without demur. But now we are witness to seeing history being repeated every year in Parliament in the matter of hypocrisy of all political parties in the context of the Women's Reservation Bill.
Every political party for the last six years has been assuring its support to the Bill which disarms women activists. And then a farce rather than a tragedy is played out by so-called radical politicians, jumping into the well of the House, tearing copies of the Bill and making impossible for proceedings to continue - the House gets adjourned, the Bill is thrown into the dustbin till it is revived in subsequent years with the same result. It is time this mockery stopped, considering that the Congress, the BJP and Left parties proclaim that they are for the Bill in the present form, and really want it to become a law.
Women are not asking for grace and charity. Their contribution to the cause of nation-building exceeds that of men. An International Labour Organisation study shows that "while women represent 50 percent of the world adult population and a third of the official labour force, they perform nearly two-third of all working hours, receive a tenth of world income and own less than one percent of world property." Therefore, reservation for women is not a bounty but only an honest recognition of their contribution to social development.
An alternative to the Bill suggests amending the Representation of People Act, 1951, to compel political parties to mandatorily nominate women candidates for at least one-third of the seats on the pain of losing recognition. This is politically flawed and not even constitutionally permissible.
It may be violative of the fundamental rights to form an association guaranteed under Article 19(1) (c) of the Constitution. The only permissible restrictions are those in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India or public order or morality, and such an amendment would not fall within these.
That apart, this alternative will not achieve the objective behind the Amendment Bill, because even if a third of women candidates are put up by political parties, there is no guarantee that the same number will get elected.
It is freely admitted by all parties that because of the inbuilt prejudice against women, male candidates will have an unfair advantage in elections. This aspect is freely admitted even by Left parties. Thus, parties will tend to allow women candidates to fight elections from their weak constituencies. Though I am all for the Bill in its present forms, it is unwise to underestimate the opposition from the male constituency in Parliament. Given the present instability in political coalitions, and the material that is in Parliament, to expect one-third of the male members to accept political hara-kiri is unrealistic. They are no Gandhians. They will not give up their privileges so easily.
There is also some merit in the objection that the reservation of seats for women would mean rotation of seats at every general election with the result that the members will not be able to nurse their constituencies and also that candidates will be uncertain of anticipating their future constituencies. This will be thus breaking their link with the electorate. Notwithstanding these ticklish problems, I would have continued insisting on the present Bill. But there is another alternative which can give one-third seats to women without in any way asking the male members to make the way.
This alternative gets further strength now that the Delimitation Commission has been asked to adopt the 2001 census for delimiting the constituencies, and therefore the same inevitable consequences must follow.
Article 81 provides for the Lok Sabha to have not more than 530 members. Further amendments were made to freeze the number of Lok Sabha members on the basis of the 1971 census till another census after 2000 had been published.
Article 82 provides for the allocation of seats upon the completion of each census. As per the 1971 census, the population of India was about 54 crores. Now after the 2001 census, it has risen to about 102 crores. So the strength of the Lok Sabha can be easily increased by one-third to 750 well within the requisite formula. This will take away the fear of any male member to vacate the present seat. These extra seats could be dovetailed into double-member constituencies, which win ensure the reservation of one seat for women and, even permitting two to be elected, if the other woman candidate gets the maximum of the votes polled.
This is what happened in former President Giri's case during the 1957 general election when both seats were won by Scheduled Caste members - one reserved and the other a general seat - because SC candidate got more votes than Mr. Giri.
The argument that the women's quota wilt be monopolised by urban women is a red herring. There are about 200 OBC candidates in the Lok Sabha, it is a stark reality dial, it is not their public service, but merely the caste configuration that has preferred them. Similar results will follow even after the reservation for women. The only difference will be a big Chink in the male bastion. That is the real reason for opposition by male MPs.
In my view, the provision of a sub-quota for the OBCs runs the risk of being held as unconstitutional. A sub-quota for Muslim women would violate secularism, a basic feature of the Constitution, and even an amendment would be illegal. Article 325 provides for one general electoral roll for every constituency and mandates that no person shall be ineligible for incursion on grounds of religion.
In the matter of the fight against injustice and discrimination, women as a class should not be weakened by seeking to bifurcate them on caste lines. Reservation for women would check the muddy politics that the men folk have brought about. It would bring social consciousness to political life. It will also help in brushing the criminal-politician nexus - the real danger to our democracy.
Bill, I am afraid, the strategy of women's organisations has been faulty from the start. Holding seminars or lobbying political leaders in their offices or on television will not help. All women's organisations, irrespective of political affiliation, should form a common platform with a single agenda. It must become a mass social movement and send out a message to all political parties, warning them that women will withdraw their backing in the next election if they do not support the Bill now.
Women in India
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| ...society |
| ...academics |
| ...religion |
| ...the arts & humanities |
| ...cultural works |
The status of women in India has been subject to many great changes over the past few millennia. From a largely unknown status in ancient times through the low points of the medieval period, to the promotion of equal rights by many reformers, the history of women in India has been eventful.
History
There are very few texts specifically dealing with the role of women; an important exception is the strIdharmapaddhati of Tryambakayajvan, an official at Thanjavur around c.1730. The text compiles strictures on womenly behaviour dating back to the Apastamba sutra (c. 4th c. BCE).[1] The opening verse goes:
mukhyo dharmaH smr^tiShu vihito bhartr^shushruShANam hi : the primary duty of women is enjoined to be service to one's husband.where the term shushruShA (lit. "desire to hear") covers a range of meanings from the devotee's homage to god, or the obsequieous service of a slave.[2]
Ancient India
Scholars believe that in ancient India, the women enjoyed equal status with men in all fields of life.[3] However, some others hold contrasting views.[4] Works by ancient Indian grammarians such as Patanjali and Katyayana suggest that women were educated in the early Vedic period[5][6] Rigvedic verses suggest that the women married at a mature age and were probably free to select their husband.[7] Scriptures such as Rig Veda and Upanishads mention several women sages and seers, notably Gargi and Maitreyi.[8]
Some kingdoms in the ancient India had traditions such as nagarvadhu ("bride of the city"). Women competed to win the coveted title of the nagarvadhu. Amrapali is the most famous example of a nagarvadhu.
According to studies, women enjoyed equal status and rights during the early Vedic period.[9] However, later (approximately 500 B.C.), the status of women began to decline with the Smritis (esp. Manusmriti) and with the Islamic invasion of Babur and the Mughal empire and later Christianity curtailing women's freedom and rights.[10]
Although reformatory movements such as Jainism allowed women to be admitted to the religious order, by and large, the women in India faced confinement and restrictions.[9] The practice of child marriages is believed to have started from around sixth century.[11]
Medieval period
The Indian woman's position in the society further deteriorated during the medieval period[3][10] when Sati, child marriages and a ban on widow remarriages became part of social life in India. The Muslim conquest in the Indian subcontinent brought the purdah practice in the Indian society. Among the Rajputs of Rajasthan, the Jauhar was practised. In some parts of India, the Devadasis or the temple women were sexually exploited. Polygamy was widely practised esp. among Hindu Kshatriya rulers.[11] In many Muslim families, women were restricted to Zenana areas.
In spite of these conditions, some women execeled in the fields of politics, literature, education and religion.[10] Razia Sultana became the only woman monarch to have ever ruled Delhi. The Gond queen Durgavati ruled for fifteen years, before she lost her life in a battle with Mughal emperor Akbar's general Asaf Khan in 1564. Chand Bibi defended Ahmednagar against the mighty Mughal forces of Akbar in 1590s. Jehangir's wife Nur Jehan effectively wielded imperial power and was recognized as the real force behind the Mughal throne. The Mughal princesses Jahanara and Zebunnissa were well-known poets, and also influenced the ruling administration Shivaji's mother, Jijabai was deputed as queen regent, because of her ability as a warrior and an administrator. In South India, many women administered villages, towns, divisions and heralded social and religious institutions.[11]
The Bhakti movements tried to restore women's status and questioned some of the forms of oppression.[9] Mirabai, a female saint-poet, was one of the most important Bhakti movement figures. Some other female saint-poets from this period include Akka Mahadevi, Rami Janabai and Lal Ded. Bhakti sects within Hinduism such as the Mahanubhav, Varkari and many others were principle movements within the Hindu fold to openly advocate social justice and equality between men and women.
Shortly after the Bhakti movement, Guru Nanak, the first Guru of Sikhs also preached the message of equality between men and women. He advocated that women be allowed to lead religious assemblies; to perform and lead congregational hymn singing called Kirtan or Bhajan; become members of religious management committees; to lead armies on the battlefield; have equality in marriage, and equality in Amrit (Baptism). Other Sikh Gurus also preached against the discrimination against women.
Historical practices
Traditions such as sati, jauhar, and devadasi have been banned and are largely defunct in modern India. However, some cases of these practices are still found in remote parts of India. The purdah is still practiced by many Indian women, and child marriage remains prevalent despite it being an illegal practice, especially under current Indian laws.
Sati Sati is an old, largely defunct custom, in which the widow was immolated alive on her husband's funeral pyre. Although the act was supposed to be a voluntary on the widow's part, it is believed to have been sometimes forced on the widow. It was abolished by the British in 1829. There have been around forty reported cases of sati since independence.[12] In 1987, the Roop Kanwar case of Rajasthan led to The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act.[13] Jauhar Jauhar refers to the practice of the voluntary immolation of all the wives and daughters of defeated warriors, in order to avoid capture and consequent molestation by the enemy. The practice was followed by the wives of defeated Rajput rulers, who are known to place a high premium on honour. Purdah Purdah is the practice of requiring women to cover their bodies so as to cover their skin and conceal their form. It imposes restrictions on the mobility of women, it curtails their right to interact freely and it is a symbol of the subordination of women. It does not reflect the religious teachings of either Hinduism or Islam, contrary to common belief, although misconception has occurred due to the ignorance and prejudices of religious leaders of both faiths. Devadasis Devadasi is a religious practice in some parts of southern India, in which women are "married" to a deity or temple. The ritual was well established by the 10th century A.D.[14] In the later period, the illegitimate sexual exploitation of the devadasi's became a norm in some parts of India.British rule
European scholars observed in the 19th century Hindu women are "naturally chaste" and "more virtuous" than other women.[15] During the British Raj, many reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Jyotirao Phule etc. fought for the upliftment of women. While this list might suggest that there was no positive British contribution during the Raj era, that is not entirely so, since missionaries' wives like Martha Mault née Mead and her daughter Eliza Caldwell née Mault are rightly remembered for pioneering the education and training of girls in south India - a practise that initially met with local resistance, as it flew in the face of tradition. Raja Rammohan Roy's efforts led to the abolition of the Sati practice under Governor-General William Cavendish-Bentinck in 1829. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's crusade for the improvement in condition of widows led to the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856. Many women reformers such as Pandita Ramabai also helped the cause of women upliftment.
Kittur Chennamma, the queen of the princely state Kittur in Karnataka, led an armed rebellion against the British in response to the Doctrine of lapse. Abbakka Rani the queen of coastal Karnataka led the defence against invading europian armies notably the Portugese in 16th century. Rani Lakshmi Bai, the Queen of Jhansi, led the Indian Rebellion of 1857 against the British. She is now widely considered as a nationalist hero. Begum Hazrat Mahal, the co-ruler of Awadh, was another ruler who led the revolt of 1857. She refused the deals with the British and later retreated to Nepal. The Begums of Bhopal were also few of the notable female rulers during this period. They did not observe purdah and were trained in martial arts.
Chandramukhi Basu, Kadambini Ganguly and Anandi Gopal Joshi were few of the earliest Indian women to obtain educational degrees.
In 1917, the first women's delegation met the Secretary of State to demand women's political rights, supported by the Indian National Congress. The All India Women's Education Conference was held in Pune in 1927.[9] In 1929, the Child Marriage Restraint Act was passed, stipulating fourteen as the minimum age of marriage for a girl through the efforts of Mahomed Ali Jinnah.[9][16] Though Mahatma Gandhi himself married at the age of thirteen, he later urged people to boycott child marriages and called upon the young men to marry the child widows.[17]
Women played an important part in India's independence struggle. Some of the famous freedom fighters include Bhikaji Cama, Dr. Annie Besant, Pritilata Waddedar, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Anjali Ammal, Aruna Asaf Ali, Sucheta Kriplani and Kasturba Gandhi. Other notable names include Muthulakshmi Reddy, Durgabai Deshmukh etc. The Rani of Jhansi Regiment of Subhash Chandra Bose's Indian National Army consisted entirely of women including Captain Lakshmi Sahgal. Sarojini Naidu, a poet and a freedom fighter, was the first Indian woman to become the President of the Indian National Congress and the first woman to become the governor of a state in India.
Independent India
Women in India now participate in all activities such as education, politics, media, art and culture, service sectors, science and technology, etc.[10]
The Constitution of India guarantees to all Indian women equality (Article 14), no discrimination by the State (Article 15(1)), equality of opportunity (Article 16), equal pay for equal work (Article 39(d)). In addition, it allows special provisions to be made by the State in favour of women and children (Article 15(3)), renounces practices derogatory to the dignity of women (Article 51(A) (e)), and also allows for provisions to be made by the State for securing just and humane conditions of work and for maternity relief. (Article 42).[18]
The feminist activism in India picked up momentum during later 1970s. One of the first national level issues that brought the women's groups together was the Mathura rape case. The acquittal of policemen accused of raping a young girl Mathura in a police station, led to a wide-scale protests in 1979–1980. The protests were widely covered in the national media, and forced the Government to amend the Evidence Act, the Criminal Procedure Code and the Indian Penal Code and introduce the category of custodial rape.[18] Female activists united over issues such as female infanticide, gender bias, women health, and female literacy.
Since alcoholism is often associated with violence against women in India,[19] many women groups launched anti-liquor campaigns in Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and other states.[18] Many Indian Muslim women have questioned the fundamental leaders' interpretation of women's rights under the Shariat law and have criticized the triple talaq system.[9]
In 1990s, grants from foreign donor agencies enabled the formation of new women-oriented NGOs. Self-help groups and NGOs such as Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) have played a major role in women's rights in India. Many women have emerged as leaders of local movements. For example, Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
The Government of India declared 2001 as the Year of Women's Empowerment (Swashakti).[9] The National Policy For The Empowerment Of Women came was passed in 2001.[20]
In 2006, the case of a Muslim rape victim called Imrana was highlighted in the media. Imrana was raped by her father-in-law. The pronouncement of some Muslim clerics that Imrana should marry her father-in-law led to widespread protests and finally Imrana's father-in-law was given a prison term of 10 years, The verdict was welcomed by many women's groups and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.[21]
Timeline
The steady change in their position can be highlighted by looking at what has been achieved by women in the country:
- 1879:John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune established the Bethune School in 1849, which developed into the Bethune College in 1879, thus becoming the first women's college in India.
- 1883: Chandramukhi Basu and Kadambini Ganguly became the first female graduates of India and the British Empire.
- 1886: Kadambini Ganguly and Anandi Gopal Joshi became the first women from India to be trained in Western medicine.
- 1905: Suzanne RD Tata becomes the first Indian woman to drive a car.[22]
- 1916: The first women's university, SNDT Women's University, was founded on June 2, 1916 by the social reformer Dhondo Keshav Karve with just five students.
- 1917: Annie Besant became the first female president of the Indian National Congress.
- 1919: For her distinguished social service, Pandita Ramabai became the first Indian woman to be awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind by the British Raj.
- 1925: Sarojini Naidu became the first Indian born female president of the Indian National Congress
- 1927: The All India Women's Conference was founded.
- 1944: Asima Chatterjee became the first Indian woman to be conferred the Doctorate of Science by an Indian university
- 1947: On August 15, 1947, following independence, Sarojini Naidu became the governor of the United Provinces, and in the process became India's first woman governor.
- 1951: Prem Mathur becomes the first Indian women commercial pilot of the Deccan Airways
- 1953: Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit became the first woman (and first Indian) president of the United Nations General Assembly
- 1959: Anna Chandy becomes the first Indian woman judge of a High Court (Kerala High Court)[23]
- 1963:Sucheta Kriplani became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, the first woman to hold that position in any Indian state.
- 1966: Captain Durga Banerjee becomes the first Indian woman pilot of the state airline, Indian Airlines.
- 1966: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay wins Ramon Magsaysay award for community leadership.
- 1966: Indira Gandhi becomes the first woman Prime Minister of India
- 1970: Kamaljit Sandhu becomes the first Indian woman to win a Gold in the Asian Games
- 1972: Kiran Bedi becomes the first female recruit to join the Indian Police Service.[24]
- 1979: Mother Teresa wins the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Indian female citizen to do so.
- 1984: On May 23, Bachendri Pal became the first Indian woman to climb Mount Everest.
- 1989: Justice M. Fathima Beevi becomes the first woman judge of the Supreme Court of India.[25]
- 1997: Kalpana Chawla becomes the first India-born woman to go into space.[26]
- 1992: Priya Jhingan becomes the first lady cadet to join the Indian Army (later commissioned on March 6, 1993)[27]
- 1994: Harita Kaur Deol becomes the first Indian woman pilot in the Indian Air Force (IAF), on a solo flight.
- 1995: Rohit Patel, a girl in a boys school is born
- 2000: Karnam Malleswari became the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal (bronze medal in the 2000 Summer Olympics at Sydney)
- 2002: Lakshmi Sahgal became the first Indian woman to run for the post of President of India.
- 2004: Punita Arora became the first woman in the Indian Army to don the highest rank of Lieutenant General.
- 2007: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak became the first Indian woman to be appointed as University Professor at an Ivy League university (Columbia University).
- 2007: Pratibha Patil becomes the first woman President of India.
- 2008: Renu Khator became the first India born woman to lead a major American university, the University of Houston.
- 2009: Meira Kumar became the first woman Speaker of Lok Sabha, the lower house in Indian Parliament
Culture
Sari (a single piece of a long cloth wound around the body) and salwar kameez are worn by women all over India. Bindi is part of the women's make-up. Traditionally, the red bindi (or sindhur) was worn only by the married Hindu women, but now it has become a part of women's fashion.[28]
Rangoli (or Kolam) is a traditional art very popular among Indian women.
Education and economic development
According to 1992-93 figures, only 9.2% of the households in India were female-headed. However, approximately 35% of the households below the poverty line were found to be female-headed.[29]
Education
-- Though it is gradually rising, the female literacy rate in India is lower than the male literacy rate. Compared to boys, far fewer girls are enrolled in the schools, and many of them drop out.[18] According to the National Sample Survey Data of 1997, only the states of Kerala and Mizoram have approached universal female literacy rates. According to majority of the scholars, the major factor behind the improved social and economic status of women in Kerala is literacy.[18]
Under Non-Formal Education programme, about 40% of the centers in states and 10% of the centers in UTs are exclusively reserved for females.[citation needed] As of 2000, about 0.3 million NFE centers were catering to about 7.42 million children, out of which about 0.12 million were exclusively for girls.[citation needed] In urban India, girls are nearly at par with the boys in terms of education. However, in rural India girls continue to be less educated than the boys.
According to a 1998 report by U.S. Department of Commerce, the chief barrier to female education in India are inadequate school facilities (such as sanitary facilities), shortage of female teachers and gender bias in curriculum (majority of the female characters being depicted as weak and helpless).[30]
Workforce participation
Contrary to the common perception, a large percent of women in India work.[31] The National data collection agencies accept the fact that there is a serious under-estimation of women's contribution as workers.[18] However, there are far fewer women in the paid workforce than there are men. In urban India Women have impressive number in the workforce. As an example at software industry 30% of the workforce is female. They are at par with their male counter parts in terms of wages, position at the work place.
In rural India, agriculture and allied industrial sectors employ as much as 89.5% of the total female labour.[29] In overall farm production, women's average contribution is estimated at 55% to 66% of the total labour. According to a 1991 World Bank report, women accounted for 94% of total employment in dairy production in India. Women constitute 51% of the total employed in forest-based small-scale enterprises.[29]
One of the most famous female business success stories is the Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad. In 2006, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who started Biocon - one of India's first biotech companies, was rated India's richest woman. Lalita Gupte and Kalpana Morparia (both were the only businesswomen in India who made the list of the Forbes World's Most Powerful Women), run India's second-largest bank, ICICI Bank.[32]
Land and property rights
In most Indian families , women do not own any property in their own names, and do not get a share of parental property.[18] Due to weak enforcement of laws protecting them, women continue to have little access to land and property.[33] In fact, some of the laws discriminate against women, when it comes to land and property rights.
The Hindu personal laws of mid-1956s (applied to Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains) gave women rights to inheritance. However, the sons had an independent share in the ancestral property, while the daughters' shares were based on the share received by their father. Hence, a father could effectively disinherit a daughter by renouncing his share of the ancestral property, but the son will continue to have a share in his own right. Additionally, married daughters, even those facing marital harassment, had no residential rights in the ancestral home. After amendment of Hindu laws in 2005, now women in have been provided the same status as that of men.[34]
In 1986, the Supreme Court of India ruled that Shah Bano, an old divorced Muslim woman was eligible for maintenance money. However, the decision was vociferously opposed by fundamentalist Muslim leaders, who alleged that the court was interfering in their personal law. The Union Government subsequently passed the Muslim Women's (Protection of Rights Upon Divorce) Act.[35]
Similarly, the Christian women have struggled over years for equal rights of divorce and succession. In 1994, all the churches, jointly with women's organisations, drew up a draft law called the Christian Marriage and Matrimonial Causes Bill. However, the government has still not amended the relevant laws.[9]
Crimes against women
Police records show high incidence of crimes against women in India. The National Crime Records Bureau reported in 1998 that the growth rate of crimes against women would be higher than the population growth rate by 2010.[18] Earlier, many cases were not registered with the police due to the social stigma attached to rape and molestation cases. Official statistics show that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of reported crimes against women.[18]
Sexual harassment
Half of the total number of crimes against women reported in 1990 related to molestation and harassment at the workplace.[18] Eve teasing is a euphemism used for sexual harassment or molestation of women by men. Many activists blame the rising incidents of sexual harassment against women on the influence of "Western culture". In 1987, The Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act was passed[36] to prohibit indecent representation of women through advertisements or in publications, writings, paintings, figures or in any other manner.
In 1997, in a landmark judgement, the Supreme Court of India took a strong stand against sexual harassment of women in the workplace. The Court also laid down detailed guidelines for prevention and redressal of grievances. The National Commission for Women subsequently elaborated these guidelines into a Code of Conduct for employers.[18]
Dowry
In 1961, the Government of India passed the Dowry Prohibition Act,[37] making the dowry demands in wedding arrangements illegal. However, many cases of dowry-related domestic violence, suicides and murders have been reported. In the 1980s, numerous such cases were reported.[31]
In 1985, the Dowry Prohibition (maintenance of lists of presents to the bride and bridegroom) rules were framed.[38] According to these rules, a signed list of presents given at the time of the marriage to the bride and the bridegroom should be maintained. The list should contain a brief description of each present, its approximate value, the name of whoever has given the present and his/her relationship to the person. However, such rules are hardly enforced.
A 1997 report[39] claimed that at least 5,000 women die each year because of dowry deaths, and at least a dozen die each day in 'kitchen fires' thought to be intentional. The term for this is "bride burning" and is criticized within India itself. Amongst the urban educated, such dowry abuse has reduced considerably.
Child marriage
Child marriage has been traditionally prevalent in India and continues to this day. Historically, young girls would live with their parents till they reached puberty. In the past, the child widows were condemned to a life of great agony, shaving heads, living in isolation, and shunned by the society.[17] Although child marriage was outlawed in 1860, it is still a common practice.[40]
According to UNICEF's "State of the World's Children-2009" report, 47% of India's women aged 20–24 were married before the legal age of 18, with 56% in rural areas.[41] The report also showed that 40% of the world's child marriages occur in India.[42]
Female infanticides and sex selective abortions
India has a highly masculine sex ratio, the chief reason being that many women die before reaching adulthood.[18] Tribal societies in India have a less masculine sex ratio than all other caste groups. This, in spite of the fact that tribal communities have far lower levels of income, literacy and health facilities.[18] It is therefore suggested by many experts, that the highly masculine sex ratio in India can be attributed to female infanticides and sex-selective abortions.
All medical tests that can be used to determine the sex of the child have been banned in India, due to incidents of these tests being used to get rid of unwanted female children before birth. Female infanticide (killing of girl infants) is still prevalent in some rural areas.[18] The abuse of the dowry tradition has been one of the main reasons for sex-selective abortions and female infanticides in India.
Domestic violence
The incidents of domestic violence are higher among the lower Socio-Economic Classes (SECs).[citation needed] The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 came into force on October 26, 2006.
Trafficking
The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act was passed in 1956.[43] However many cases of trafficking of young girls and women have been reported. These women are either forced into prostitution, domestic work or child labor.
Other concerns
HealthThe average female life expectancy today in India is low compared to many countries, but it has shown gradual improvement over the years. In many families, especially rural ones, the girls and women face nutritional discrimination within the family, and are anaemic and malnourished.[18]
The maternal mortality in India is the second highest in the world.[9] Only 42% of births in the country are supervised by health professionals. Most women deliver with help from women in the family who often lack the skills and resources to save the mother's life if it is in danger.[18] According to UNDP Human Development Report (1997), 88% of pregnant women (age 15-49) were found to be suffering from anemia.[29]
Family planningThe average woman in rural areas of India has little or no control over her reproductivity. Women, particularly women in rural areas, do not have access to safe and self-controlled methods of contraception. The public health system emphasises permanent methods like sterilisation, or long-term methods like IUDs that do not need follow-up. Sterilization accounts for more than 75% of total contraception, with female sterilisation accounting for almost 95% of all sterilisations.[18]
Notable Indian women
Singers and vocalists such as M.S. Subbulakshmi, Gangubai Hangal, Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle are widely revered in India. Many actresses such as Aishwarya Rai. Anjolie Ela Menon is a famous painter.
SportsAlthough the general sports scenario in India is not very good, some Indian women have made notable achievements in the field. Some of the famous female sportspersons in Indian include P. T. Usha, J. J. Shobha (athletics), Kunjarani Devi (weightlifting), Diana Edulji (cricket), Saina Nehwal (badminton) , Koneru Hampi (chess) and Sania Mirza (tennis). Karnam Malleswari (weightlifter), is the only Indian woman to have won an Olympic medal (Bronze medal in 2000).
PoliticsThrough the Panchayat Raj institutions, over a million women have actively entered political life in India.[33] As per the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts, all local elected bodies reserve one-third of their seats for women. Although the percentages of women in various levels of political activity has risen considerably, women are still under-represented in governance and decisionmaking positions.[18]
Some of the notable women leaders in India include Indira Gandhi, Sushma Swaraj, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Sheila Dikshit, Jayalalitha, Uma Bharati, Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee Sindhu Joyand Sonia Gandhi. On July 25, 2007 the country's ever first woman president Pratibha Patil was sworn in.
LiteratureSudha Murthy, Sarojini Naidu, Chandabai, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, Mahadevi Varma, Shivani, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Shashi Deshpande, Shobha De, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, etc. are some of the notable female Indian authors.
ReligionMata Amritanandamayi, Mother Meera, Mate Mahadevi
Other fieldsShahnaz Husain is one of the popular Indian beauticians and entrepreneur. Mirudhubashini Govindarajan is a women's healthcare specialist.
See also
References
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- ^ see extensive excerpts from strIdharmapaddhati at http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/~amit/books/tryambakayajvan-1989-perfect-wife-stridharmapaddhati.html
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- ^ Varttika by Katyayana, 125, 2477
- ^ Comments to Ashtadhyayi 3.3.21 and 4.1.14 by Patanjali
- ^ R. C. Majumdar and A. D. Pusalker (editors): The history and culture of the Indian people. Volume I, The Vedic age. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan 1951, p.394
- ^ "Vedic Women: Loving, Learned, Lucky!". http://hinduism.about.com/library/weekly/aa031601c.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
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- ^ a b c d "Women in History". National Resource Center for Women. http://nrcw.nic.in/index2.asp?sublinkid=450. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ a b c Jyotsana Kamat (2006-1). "Status of Women in Medieval Karnataka". http://www.kamat.com/jyotsna/women.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ Vimla Dang (1998-06-19). "Feudal mindset still dogs women's struggle". The Tribune. http://www.tribuneindia.com/50yrs/women.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
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- ^ Dubois, Jean Antoine and Beauchamp, Henry King, Hindu manners, customs, and ceremonies, Clarendon press, 1897
- ^ Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity, Ian Bryant Wells
- ^ a b Jyotsna Kamat (2006-12-19). "Gandhi and Status of Women". http://www.kamat.com/mmgandhi/gwomen.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Kalyani Menon-Sen, A. K. Shiva Kumar (2001). "Women in India: How Free? How Equal?". United Nations. http://www.un.org.in/wii.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
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- ^ "National Policy For The Empowerment Of Women (2001)". http://www.wcd.nic.in/empwomen.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ "OneWorld South Asia News: Imrana". http://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/141611/1/. Retrieved 2006-12-25.
- ^ "Mumbai Police History". http://www.mumbaipolice.org/aboutus/history.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ "High Court of Kerala: Former Chief Justices / Judges". http://highcourtofkerala.nic.in/judge.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ "Kiran Bedi Of India Appointed Civilian Police Adviser". http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2003/sga827.doc.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-25.
- ^ http://highcourtofkerala.nic.in/judge.htm
- ^ http://www.funlok.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1498
- ^ "Army'S First Lady Cadet Looks Back". http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/LAND-FORCES/Army/Articles/Article29.html. Retrieved 2007-03-30.
- ^ Kamat's Potpourri: The Significance of the holy dot (Bindi)
- ^ a b c d "Asia's women in agriculture, environment and rural production: India". http://www.fao.org/sd/wpdirect/WPre0108.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ Victoria A. Velkoff (October 1998). "Women of the World: Women's Education in India" (PDF). U.S. Department of Commerce. http://www.census.gov/ipc/prod/wid-9801.pdf. Retrieved 2006-12-25.
- ^ a b "Women of India: Frequently Asked Questions". 2006-12-19. http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/women/faq.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ India's Most Powerful Businesswomen. Forbes.com.
- ^ a b Carol S. Coonrod (June 1998). "Chronic Hunger and the Status of Women in India". http://www.thp.org/reports/indiawom.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ THE HINDU SUCCESSION (AMENDMENT) ACT, 2005
- ^ "The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act". May 1986. http://www.sudhirlaw.com/themuslimwomen.htm. Retrieved 2008-02-14.
- ^ "The Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1987". http://www.wcd.nic.in/dowryprohibitionrules.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ "The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961". http://www.wcd.nic.in/dowryprohibitionact.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ "The Dowry Prohibition (maintenance of lists of presents to the bride and bridegroom) rules, 1985". http://www.wcd.nic.in/dowryprohibitionrules.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
- ^ Kitchen fires Kill Indian Brides with Inadequate Dowry, July 23, 1997, New Delhi, UPI
- ^ BBC News | SOUTH ASIA | Child marriages targeted in India
- ^ http://www.unicef.org/sowc09/docs/SOWC09_Table_9.pdf
- ^ http://www.hindu.com/2009/01/18/stories/2009011855981100.htm
- ^ "The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956". http://www.wcd.nic.in/act/itpa1956.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
Bibliography
- Women in Ancient India by Clarisse Bader. Trubner's Oriental Series. Routledge, 2001. ISBN 9780415244893.
External links
- "Nothing to Go Back To - The Fate of the Widows of Vrindavan, India" WNN - Women News Network
- National Commission for Women
- Ministry of Women & Child Development
- South Asian Women's NETwork (SAWNET)
- Women of the Mughal Dynasty
- Indian women & Dowry law misuse
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India's Parliament: Women Wanted?
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No one can accuse the Indian legislature of doing things in a hurry. Or of doing them quietly. Sixteen years after a measure reserving one third of parliament's seats for women was first introduced in Parliament, a bill to this effect was introduced for the fourth time last week. Parliamentarians opposed to the bill rushed toward the Law Minister to snatch copies from his hands and physically prevent him from introducing it, while the hapless minister sought refuge between two women ministers — who looked on startled and amused and eventually matched their male rivals in a fine display of lung power.
The bill was finally introduced despite the high drama, and the Congress Party–led government could claim to have kept its promise. But no one seriously believes Congress is committed to seeing the measure enacted into law — it was introduced just four days before the parliamentary session was to close. Now, it will be examined — yet again — by a parliamentary committee, until it is taken up for discussion and possibly voting in the monsoon session of parliament that begins in July. Some of the bill's most virulent opponents are part of Congress's coalition, including Railways Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, and the ruling party is not about to upset an apple cart already teetering due to soaring inflation and the jinxed Indo-U.S. nuclear deal.
Opponents of the bill are acting as much out of political expediency as out of plain old-fashioned gender bias. Smaller but influential caste-based parties, which often revolve around a few all-powerful leaders, think their influence will dwindle if established leaders have to make room for newer, inexperienced women representatives. At present, there are 50 women among the 543 members of the lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha — just 9%. If the bill were passed, the number would have to rise to 181, meaning scores of male leaders would have to make way.
There is a degree of irony in an affirmative action for women politicians bill being introduced at a time when two of the most important players in the country's politics are women — Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi and Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati, who may or may not become Prime Minister but can upset everyone else's calculations. But it may simply be an admission that India's long tradition of powerful women in politics — from Sarojini Naidu, who became the first woman to lead the Indian National Congress in 1925 during its struggle for independence from Britain, to Indira Gandhi, who became the country's first woman Prime Minister in 1966, and the plethora of women ministers and state chief ministers that have followed — has not improved the lives of the majority of Indian women. In keeping with South Asian tradition, most high-profile women politicians in India — with a few notable exceptions — have reached the top on the shoulders of illustrious fathers or husbands. Once elected, they have not beaten the system, but mostly perpetuated it. None has ever made women's issues a central plank of their politics.
One reason successive Indian governments have failed to pass the bill reserving seats for women is that women's issues and perspectives are not on any of the parties' electoral radar. Delhi's Chief Minister, Sheila Dixit, for example, was reelected after improving the city's transport system and pollution levels, despite a shocking increase in crimes against women on her watch. Moreover, women voters, just like women politicians, are swayed more by party affiliations than by gender — for example, there has been no groundswell of support for Mayawati from women voters. Gender issues have simply not been part of the mainstream political discourse. So try as India's feminists might to shame male politicians into passing a bill reserving seats for women, their chances of success are slim in a political culture in which shamelessness is par for the course.
Milli Council to launch mass movement on women reservation
By Mumtaz Alam Falahi, TwoCircles.net,
New Delhi: All India Milli Council has decided to launch a mass movement to force the government to include Muslim and other backward class women in the Women's Reservation Bill. "The Bill in its present form is not acceptable to us. We will oppose,," announced Dr Manzoor Alam, General Secretary, All India Milli Council, in a press conference today in New Delhi.
"Muslims feel that as of now they are under-represented by 50%. Lok Sabha which, according to the Muslim population, should have 73 Muslim members has only 32 Muslims. State Legislatures too have about 50% less representation of Muslims. We fear that because of their economic and political clout the upper classes get even higher representation through their women at the cost of Dalits and minorities particularly Muslims," Dr Manzoor Alam said while being flanked by representatives of other Muslim organizations and social organizations from other communities at the press conference.
L-R: Abdul Hameed Nomani, B S Sidhu, Z. M. Khan, Ilyas Malik, Manzoor Alam, Navaid Hamid
"We fear that if the Bill is passed in its present form, it would further disempower the classes under-represented in Parliament and state legislatures," Dr Alam maintained.
In the last 60 years the voice of the voiceless has been little heard. So there is a need to give reservation to these backward classes in the Women Reservation Bill. Otherwise, this will diminish the presence of these classes in the Parliament, he said.
"If the present Bill is passed without due consideration and accomodation of under-represented classes like Dalits, tribals and minorities, their representation in Parliament and state legislaures is sure to decline. We can look at models from Mauritius, Japan and European countries that are devised to accommodate the under-represented classes," Dr Alam said.
He announced to launch a mass movement on the issue as the government has set a deadline of 100 days for passing the Bill. Milli Council in collaboration with other like-minded organizations will hold protests and dharna to press the demand.
Maulana Abdul Hameed Nomani, Asst General Secretary, Jamiat Ulama-I-Hind, said that with this bill 55% of seats in Parliament will be reserved as SC/ST/OBC are already enjoying reservation. This will make further difficult for Muslims to get tickets from their parties and win elections. He said Muslim women should be given share, according to their population, in the present Bill.
National Integration Council Member Navaid Hamid also supported quota within quota to give representation to Muslim women and women of other backward classes in the Parliament.
Dr Archana of Dr B R Ambedkar Sewa Dal raised an important question saying that this is the first time that government has introduced a reservation bill without recommendation of any commission. Reservation to SC/ST and OBC was granted on the recommendations of commissions set up to look into the issues.
Dr Manzoor Alam claimed that Muslim organizations including Jamiat Ulama-I-Hind, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, Jamiat Ahle Hadees and All India Muslim Majlise Mushawarat have endorsed Milli Council's view, and they will be part of the movement.
As for the representation of Muslim women in Lok Sabha, they have never crossed the mark of three. Like in the current 15th Lok Sabha, they were three in 6th and 8th Lok Sabha. In six Lok Sabhas (1st, 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th and 12th), there was no Muslim woman MP. Of 549 women Lok Sabha members so far, only 18 have been Muslims.
Muslim women in Lok Sabhas
| Total No. of women | Muslim women | Party | Constituency |
1st Lok Sabha
| 23 | Nil |
2nd Lok Sabha
| 24 | Mafida Ahmed | Congress | Jorhat (Assam) |
|
| Maimoona Sultan | Congress | Bhopal (MP) |
3rd Lok Sabha
| 37 | Zohraben Akbarbhai Chavda | Congress | Banaskantha (Guj) |
|
| Maimoona Sultan | Congress | Bhopal (MP) |
4th Lok Sabha
| 32 | Nil |
5th Lok Sabha
| 26 | Nil |
6th Lok Sabha
| 18 | Akbar Jahan Begum | National Conference | Srinagar (J&K) |
|
| Rashida Haque Choudhury | Congress | Silchar (Assam) |
|
| Mohsina Kidwai | Congress | Azamgarh (UP) |
7th Lok Sabha
| 32 | Begam Abida Ahmed | Congress | Bareilly (UP) |
|
| Mohsina Kidwai | Congress | Merut (UP) |
8th Lok Sabha
| 46 | Begum Akbar Jahan Abdullah | NC | Anantnag (J&K) |
|
| Begam Abida Ahmed | Congress | Bareilly (UP) |
|
| Mohsina Kidwai | Congress | Merut (UP) |
9th Lok Sabha
| 28 | Nil |
10th Lok Sabha
| 42 | Nil |
11th Lok Sabha
| 41 | Begum Noor Bano | Congress | Rampur (UP) |
12th Lok Sabha
| 44 | Nil |
13th Lok Sabha
| 52 | Begum Noor Bano | Congress | Rampur (UP) |
14th Lok Sabha
| 45 | Sayda Rubab | SP | Bahraich (UP) |
15th Lok Sabha
| 59 | Tabassum Begum | BSP | Kairana (UP) |
|
| Kaisar Jahan | BSP | Sitapur (UP) |
|
| Mausam Noor | Congress | Maldah Uttar (WB) |
Revisiting the Women's Reservation Debate
Kavita Krishnan
Once again, the debate over Women's Reservation Bill has resurfaced, in the wake of the President's speech promising to enact 33% quota for women in assemblies and parliament as well as 50% quota in panchayats. After 13 years of delays and vacillations, the women's movement and progressive forces are naturally demanding that the Government and main ruling parties, who no longer have any excuse not to enact the Bill, walk their talk this time without any further delay.
The cacophony of misogynistic rhetoric voiced against the Bill since 1996, and revived this time around, has rightly invited outrage. However, let us set aside the anti-women baggage for a while, and re-examine the main case against the Bill, as articulated mainly by parties and leaders claiming to represent the dalits and OBCs. The crux of the debate is: will the Women's Bill in its present form militate against OBC representation in parliament and benefit only elite, privileged women, and must it therefore include a quota within quota for OBC women, as a precondition for passing the Bill?
Does the women's quota indeed represent a threat to political representation of oppressed and backward castes?
In the first place, we must note that provision has already been made, in the Bill, for 33% quota for women within the existing 22% SC/ST quota. So Mulayam Singh's warning to the (dalit woman) Speaker in his parliamentary diatribe against the Bill, that the Bill, if enacted, would prevent her own entry into Parliament, is obviously baseless.
The question of quota within quota for OBC women is more complicated – mainly because of the fact that there is no existing OBC quota at any level in representative institutions. The question of OBC quota in assemblies and parliament is being brought up only in response to the Women's Bill. Even in Bihar, where the state government headed by the JD(U) (the party of Sharad Yadav, the most vocal opponent of the Women's Bill) has instituted 50% quota for women in panchayats, there is a quota within quota for women from SC/ST and Most Backward Castes (MBCs), not for OBCs as such.
OBC representation in assemblies and parliament has, by all accounts, increased significantly since the 1980s. If 33% seats are reserved for women, will it result in a decline in OBC representation? Won't OBC women win seats which OBC men have been winning? No, say the opponents of the Bill – arguing that elite, educated, privileged, usually upper caste women will steal a march over OBC women. The lion's share of the benefits of women's quota, they say, will accrue to the more privileged upper caste women.
This argument seems to be founded on a fallacy about the nature of electoral and political mechanisms. In reservation in general, it is true, where it is individuals who compete for limited seats – in jobs or education – it is the more privileged who are likely to corner the lion's share of quotas. For instance, in the case of OBC quota, intended to correct the underrepresentation of OBCs in jobs and higher education, working class poor and women from these castes are less likely to avail benefits as compared to those from the same castes who are relatively more privileged educationally and economically. But the question arises: while OBCs continue to be underrepresented in jobs and higher education, necessitating the OBC quota, how come they are fairly well represented in parliament and many assemblies? Why has the upper caste domination in Indian politics been decisively broken, without any quota? The reason is that OBC political forces have ridden a wave of popular social mobilization that has asserted itself since the 1980s. Politics – including electoral politics – is all about contending social mobilizations, where the caliber and privileges of individual candidates is relatively secondary. This is the reason why a Phoolan Devi (the former bandit) won electoral battles even without any OBC quota. It is one matter that parties have been reluctant to field such women candidates, thus necessitating a women's quota, but the example of Phoolan Devi suggests that when given a chance, OBC women have not fared worse than their male counterparts in electoral battles. The same social forces which benefited male OBC leaders has played in their favour too, and their lack of educational privilege has not come in the way of electoral success. The point is that politics is not a personality contest, and there is simply no reason why OBC women should fare badly in comparison with upper caste women once the Women's Bill is brought into effect. Even the apprehension that OBC women might be denied tickets because they would be seen as less 'winnable' than more privileged women, doesn't hold water. Winnability, in our electoral process, is decided less by individual privilege alone – and more by the position of candidate and party in the social balance of forces. It is this which is the biggest factor in parties' decisions to field candidates. There is no reason why a party, in a constituency where their position in the social balance would favour an OBC candidate, would choose a non-OBC candidate in case the seat is reserved for women. Reservation for women would not alter the social balance of forces – it would only eliminate the aspect of gender discrimination from the social equation in that particular election.
Why is OBC quota proposed only in response to the Women's Bill, while it is not seen as necessary in general? Opponents of the Bill retort that it is precisely to counter the threat of growing OBC assertion in politics that the upper caste dominated parties have embraced the Women's Bill. Again, such an argument is based on a fallacious and superficial understanding of the basis of the increased OBC representation in politics. OBC political assertion reflects the growing assertion of an emergent kulak class in agrarian India. To reduce it to the assertion of the marginalised 'backward castes' alone would be to ignore that it also reflects the assertion of a powerful emergent landed class, which represents a more privileged layer within the backward castes, while, however, positioning itself as the voice of the genuine social and political aspirations of the backward castes as a whole. The ruling class including the dominant national ruling parties have, to a large extent, accommodated this kulak class and its political representatives, which have not proved in any way a hurdle to the economic and social policy thrust of other ruling class parties. The initial expectations from some quarters, that these parties would prove a hurdle to communal politics or to neoliberal economic policy have been badly belied. Tensions might remain between powerful 'regional' players and national formations, but the latter, while they might seek to replace the regional outfits, will do so by accommodating the OBC-kulak forces rather than by jettisoning them. Moreover, the Women's Bill is highly unlikely to overturn the power of the agrarian kulak class in the balance of social forces. Rather, the same political logic and process that has benefited OBC male leaders is likely to benefit OBC women as well.
Sharad Yadav, in a recent interview in Tehelka, rephrased his 'parkati' brand of argument against educated, urbanised women leaders, in more palatable and even 'progressive' words. He said Sita-Savitri were usually seen as representative of Indian women, and he instead wanted the Draupadis – women who dared to fight Mahabharatas for justice – to find political representation. "If the weaker sections of the society are not included, only people like Sushma Swaraj and Brinda Karat will be seen in the Lok Sabha, not the true Draupadis who represent the real India," he said. Brave words. But there is a problem: Brinda Karat, a prominent leader of the left-led women's movement, cannot be called an advocate of 'Sita-Savitri' even by her worst detractors. In contrast to the considerable efforts of the women's movement and the Left-led women's groups, what has Sharad Yadav or his party ever done to mobilize the Draupadis against patriarchies? The accusation of being 'elite' and cut off from Indian culture and social reality is a favourite one to level against women's movement activists – and Sushma Swaraj would happily join Sharad Yadav in thus branding the women's movement as un-Indian! Such accusations ignore the fact that if women's movement leaders from middle class, educated backgrounds represent one kind of relative privilege in respect to their working class sisters, politicians of ruling class parties – including OBC leaders from kulak backgrounds, also represent considerable class (and gender) privilege, and are not unmediated 'natural' representatives of 'deprivation'. The idea that educated middle class women – as leaders of the women's movement or as representatives in political institutions are somehow less authentic and less representative of the 'real Indian women' needs to be challenged very strongly, because such arguments are inevitably deployed to legitimize patriarchies in the name of 'Indian culture,' falsely suggesting that 'authentic' Indian women are those who accept and embrace such patriarchies.
It is not our case that 'OBC parties' and leaders like Sharad Yadav or Mulayam are more anti-women than those from the Congress or BJP. Rather, they are pitting the OBC agenda against women, not simply because they are anti-women or even because they feel more threat from the Women's Bill, but because they perceive a political benefit in flaunting purported concern for OBCs. Sharad Yadav, for instance, is clearly seeking to use the Women's Bill issue as a timely tool in his bid to pose as OBC messiah and step into the shoes left vacant by the decline of Laloo Yadav. Today, in any case, there is no unity even in the camp of OBC leaders and parties, on the 'quota within quota' position. Nitish Kumar of the JD(U) has strategically chosen not to endorse his party colleague Sharad Yadav's stand on the Women's Bill. In Parliament, Mulayam Singh too said not a word about 'quota within quota' for OBC women, choosing instead to suggest the even weaker mechanism of a party-wise quota of 20% tickets to women candidates.
In his speech in Parliament, Mulayam Singh said that with 22% reserved for SC/STs, and 33% for women, there would be no space left for upper castes and backward castes. He said that leaders like Advani, Joshi, and others had reached the Lok Sabha through hard struggles, and the Women's Bill would 'destroy this leadership.' He also employed the usual misogynistic spectre of women in parliament relegating men to domestic work, saying "those thumping tables today will tomorrow be left thumping mattresses at home," and lamented the 'state of affairs' where women like Sonia, Mamata, Jayalalitha and Mayawati were calling the shots everywhere. Interestingly, these arguments were clearly targeted not just at OBCs but specifically at upper caste leaders (even naming them), and even more interestingly, his implication that women elected through quotas would not be the product of 'hard struggles' and would destroy able leadership, actually echoes the meritocratic arguments posed by protestors against OBC quotas. Clearly, be it Sharad Yadav or Mulayam, the arguments against the Bill are not just emanating from 'concern for OBC representation', but rather these leaders have complex and distinct motivations that have necessitated different articulations and emphases at different political junctures.
We do not oppose a 'quota within quota' on principle, nor do we reject it on the spurious argument that 'women' are an undifferentiated category uninflected by caste and class. In fact, it would be our greatest concern that women from oppressed castes and classes get their share of representation. What are objectionable are the attempts to use the OBC issue as a smokescreen to stall the Women's Bill. To employ an analogy: would it not have been highly objectionable if the implementation of Mandal recommendations on OBC quotas in jobs and education had been stalled for years on the pretext that a quota within quota for OBC women, or for that matter economically deprived OBC students and youth, was a precondition, to accommodate the apprehension that these sections might be less able to benefit?
The need of the hour now is to pass the Women's Bill in its present form without a moment's further delay. If indeed experience reveals that women's reservation is resulting in any appreciable decline in OBC representation, OBC quota in assemblies and parliament, in general as well as within the women's quota, can be accommodated through amendment.
Home > Liberation > Year_2009 > July_09 > Revisiting the Women's Reservation Debate
http://www.cpiml.org/liberation/year_2009/july_09/debate.html
And aren't OBC women "women"? Loud thinking on the Women's Reservation Bill
The career of the Women's Reservation Bill in Parliament since it first appeared in 1996 as the 81st Amendment Bill, has been striking for the high drama and rhetoric of women's rights that has accompanied it, the passionate opposition to the proposed 33% reservation for women in Parliament, generally being characterised by its supporters as anti-women and patriarchal. However, if we try to organize the welter of arguments that have been flying around for 13 years, we would find that while the proponents of the measure certainly base their claims on the idea of gender justice, the opposition to the Bill does not come from an anti-women position. Rather, the latter arguments stem from either
1) a generally anti-reservation position (which I am not interested in here) or
2) a claim that reservations for women should take into account other disempowered identities within this group – that is, the "quotas within quotas" position, which says that there should be reservation within the 33% for OBC and Muslim women. (The 22.7% reservation for SC/ST women would come into operation automatically.)
In other words, the sharp opposition to the Bill cannot simply be dismissed as anti-women. Take for instance, Sharad Yadav's much reviled comment, derisively referring to "short-haired women" (par-kati mahilaen) who would overrun Parliament. This has been widely attacked for its misogyny, but we do need to see it as expressing a legitimate fear that the composition of parliament would be radically altered overnight, in favour of upper classes and upper castes – the image of women with coiffed short hair drawing upon a common stereotype of westernized and elite women. Now, of course this stereotype is misogynist, or anti-feminst, or both, but as a feminist I do insist that this is not the point here, for no feminist can be under the impression that all the support for women's reservations comes from strongly anti-patriarchal sources. Come on, these are the very parties that consistently refuse to field women candidates, which have hardly any women in decision-making position unless they have the right kind of family-tree. It is the patriarchal operation of these very parties from CPI(M) to BJP (and all the others in between) for over 60 years that has made reservations for women necessary in the first place.
So is the fear justified that the WRB is an upper-caste ploy to stem the tide of lower-caste men in Parliament? Let us look at the experience of reservations for women at the local level, in Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI), since 1992. Studies in several states (for instance, Gujarat, Karnataka, West Bengal) have confirmed that while there has also been a positive impact on the lives of women, mostly on the lives of the elected women; by and large, reservations for women have strengthened the entrenched power of the dominant caste groups of the area. That is, men of less dominant castes in PRI have been replaced by women of the dominant castes. A blanket reservation for "women", it seems, unsuprisingly, brings to power women of dominant groups and castes in society. In other words, an immediate filling of 33% seats with a supposedly undifferentiated category of "women" would certainly change the caste character of Parliament in the short term at least, to one more comfortable to many. How else to understand BJP's determined opposition to Mandal reservations and fervent support for women's reservations?
"Women" versus OBC men – that appears to be the winning formula.
(This is why I am suspicious of the sudden introduction in JNU last year of 5 "deprivation points" – JNU's excellent affirmative action policy works on a system of deprivation points - across the board for "women" students, concurrently with the first phase of implementation of the Mandal reservations).
What I fail to understand is why the "quotas within quotas" position is so unacceptable to progressive people. After all, surely the idea of reservations for women in Parliament is not based on the understanding that the biological category called "women" needs to be represented? If we are arguing that the social experience of being positioned as "women" within current economic, cultural and political arrangements is disadvantageous vis-a-vis men, and needs to be reflected in Parliament, then we need to accept that this experience is inflected differently by caste and community – that is, the social experience of being an upper-caste, urban Hindu woman, while definitely shaped by one kind of patriarchy, is nevertheless different from the experience of being an OBC or Muslim woman. Why should not the latter also have representation in Parliament?
Certainly feminists have long accepted this, hence our use of "patriarchies" rather than a monolithic "patriarchy."
I agree it's worth calling Sharad Yadav's bluff, Sohail, but it would be much more effective to do so by conceding quotas within quotas!
Posted in Debates, Genders, Government, Identities, Politics | Tags: quotas within quotas, Sharad Yadav, Women's Reservations Bill
Brilliant post Nivedita! I have had similar reflections, but was afraid to express it for fear of being branded a misogynist.
I am not against WRB at all, but yes, certain sections within women are more marginalised than the rest. I also heard from a bjp stouge the other day, that they support these reservations (on such a broad basis) also because they feel that the constituencies that will be drawn for the purpose will undermine minority communities that have a large holding/political power over a particular area….its all the more necessary now for women themselves to condemn such tactics.
I also think that you hav made a commendable point here about women politicians that are in the public arena are more so because of the "right family tree." This is true not of politics alone, but almost every field – be it those who manage to get their books published in famous publication houses as I realised in my college days, to those who are famous if not effecient lawyers because of a family legacy of advocates to even civil service officers! Its not very often that we see women being able to emerge independently of these factors, which is a matter of great pity and all the more reason to make resources available right down to the most subordinate classes.
By: Assad on June 7, 2009
at 12:02 PM
Well Assad, I must clarify that it is not only "women politicians" that are in the public arena because of the "right family tree" – these trees (and not the green ones, alas!) are constitutive of our public spaces for both men and women, whether politicians, film-stars or the corporate world. So if women form the bahu-beti-biwi brigade, men form the beta-bhatija brigade.
My point here was that I find it revealing that political parties that give women no space at all, except if they have the right connections, are suddenly united across the board in being"feminist" and wanting to reserve seats for women.
That said, I think we agree, as you put it, that "Its not very often that we see women being able to emerge independently of these factors, which is a matter of great pity and all the more reason to make resources available right down to the most subordinate classes."
By: Nivedita Menon on June 7, 2009
at 12:38 PM
What I don't understand Nivi, is why should the OBC lobby not demand OBC reservations in Parliament just like there is SC/ST reservation – in other words, why do they want OBC reservation only amongst women and not amongst men?
While I support OBC quota for both male and female in the Parliament of India, I think the panic over women's quota suggesting that upper caste/class women will monopolise it is irrational. If a seat is declared women's only, and an OBC politician had been winning it for three terms, there's no reason why the OBC politician's wife or daughter will not contest it. Dynastic politics is not an exclusive preserve of the upper castes.
By: Shivam Vij on June 7, 2009
at 3:15 PM
"If a seat is declared women's only, and an OBC politician had been winning it for three terms, there's no reason why the OBC politician's wife or daughter will not contest it. Dynastic politics is not an exclusive preserve of the upper castes." – bang on Shivam! I also had the same doubt in my mind when I read Nivedita's post.
By: zainab1979 on June 7, 2009
at 5:20 PM
I think it may be useful for you guys to look at the electoral system nepal adopted last year for the CA elections. It has ensured that more than 33 percent of the 601 strong assembly consists of women which is the highest in south asia. It also paved the way for the most inclusive house in nepal's history in terms of ethnic diversity.
This is what the parties agreed on.
There were 240 seats in the first past the post system and 335 seats under the PR system (there were two ballots and in PR, a party would nominate candidates on the basis of vote percentage received). Under FPTP, there was just a general non enforceable normative direction in the interim constitution and election laws that the parties would have candidates that reflected all forms of diversity and give space to marginalised.(no separate reservation for dalits which was a big weakness) In PR though, there was a rule that each party would have to nominate among its candidates 33 percent women, 13 percent dalits (within which category there had to be 33 percent women),33 percent madhesis (33 percent women within this broad category), 37 percent janjatis with the women reservation within it, and a certain percentage was allocated to representatives from backward regions. there was a lot of confusion because when you added it all up, it came to 116 percent! But that was because of the element of overlapping.
There were drawbacks of course. Many complained that the system would be incomprehensible to the common voter. Because the lists given in by parties to the EC pre polls were not closed, it meant that the party bosses got empowered to nominate who they wanted to post polls – within the broad framework laid out – entrenching the patronage system further. There were some who argued that ethnic identity – gender subsumed under it – would end up becoming the sole determinant of political choices if we adopted this. The hill upper castes fearing their stranglehold would be broken suddenly started that jaded argument of how this is reverse discrimination against them. But with the maoists, janjatis and madhesis pushing the inclusive agenda very strongly, the system was accepted.
What did that leave us with post polls? There was only one dalit in a house of 205 in the previous parliament. This time there were close to 50, still less than their population share but a leap nonetheless. There were 33 percent women, more than 200 in a house of 601 – if i remember right, 29 women won in the FPTP system out of which 23 were maoist candidates and the rest came from PR. There were 200 madhesis and an even higher number of janjatis.
The Indian case is obviously different in the absence of the PR system. But i think the nepal case shows the need to provide space to women within the broader categories of ethnic/caste reservation or, in your case, alternately provide space to women of disadvantaged communities within the broad women reservation bill.
On the basis of what has been a fairly fruitful experiment here, I agree with your argument nivi.
By: Prashant on June 7, 2009
at 6:37 PM
This is the election law for those of you interested.
http://www.election.gov.np/EN/pdf/CAE_Election_Act_2064_english.pdf
By: Prashant on June 7, 2009
at 6:39 PM
So now India will have to learn from Nepal. This is what it has come to! :)
By: Shivam Vij on June 7, 2009
at 9:26 PM
Very interesting process in Nepal. One complicating factor in India is that the various states object to any dilution of their "share" of the Lok Sabha. This is why even though the constitution recommends one lok sabha seat for every 500,000 to 750,000 voters, the number of Lok Sabha seats has remained unchanged at 543 (the same as in 1971). So the PR system will have to be introduced in a way so as to leave the relative shares of states unchanged. In principle, that could be done.
With regard to the caste and religion distribution, it varies across states. So, again the PR system will have to take account of this fact. In principle, again, this could be done. But I guess the modifications, not surprisingly, will make the resulting system more complex than that of Nepal and I am not sure it will be worth it.
Many countries with a First-past-the-post system have modified their electoral systems to have a combination of FPTP and PR. Britain, for instance, has done so. While the UK General Elections still use the first-past-the-post, the elections to the regional assemblies (Scottish, Welsh etc.) and the European parlaiment all have a PR element.
I suppose, like Britain and other countries, we too will modify our FPTP system at some point. The issue is being discussed actively within India, though mostly within "think tanks" and the like. It will take a lot more "dissatisfaction" before we develop the political consensus needed for a change of this magnitude: Note the difficulty we are having with the Women's Representation Bill, which involves a far smaller change.
Regarding reservation for OBCs: Are the OBCs underrepresented in Parliament? Muslims, yes: While they are about 13.4% of the population, their share of the Lok Sabha amounts to 7% or so, probably even less. But what is the share of the OBCs currently? If they are not underrepresented, then why reservations? I am just curious. (I've not been able to locate any figure giving the OBC representation in the Lok Sabha, so I'd be grateful if anyone can give it.)
By: suresh on June 8, 2009
at 2:06 AM
This is fun.
The best thing would be proportional representation for all. 50:50 seates reserved for men and women. After this 50% split we go about proportional reperesentation for every caste / sub caste, religion and tribe. Add to this a dash of handicapped quota. That would be the right logical way.
By: Rageina on June 8, 2009
at 3:11 PM
Shivam, sure, it is possible to speculate that an OBC man's seat would return his wife or daughter if it is reserved for women, but a) quota-within-quota would *ensure* an OBC woman in some seat if not that one. So what's the problem, unless you have a problem with OBC women getting into Parliament (which you dont) and
b) speculations apart, the experience of 20 years of PRI, as I have said in my post, is that reservations for women have tended to fill those seats with women of the dominant caste groups. Your logical speculation hasn't worked there.
Suresh, I agree with you that the FPTP system needs to be restructured, to be replaced by or to include some form of PR. But I would like to push that even further (because all change begins with dreams), and think of PR not only in terms of political parties, but somehow to think of a system which can give PR to politically salient groups on a short-term basis – for example, an anti-SEZ coalition, for example! PR with political parties alone does tend to entrench the power of party bosses, as Prashant's info on Nepal shows.
And about the current representation of OBC's in Parliament, Christophe Jaffrelot's work ("India's Silent revolution. The Rise of the lower castes in North India") shows that the OBC component in Parliament has actually gone up over the 1980's. But that is is precisely my point – it is in order to counter this rise that "women" are being touted across the board from BJP to CPM.
(I keep putting women in quotation marks because apparently, OBC and Muslim women aren't women, only an abstract category called women counts, which in concrete terms works out to – upper caste women against OBC men).
Thanks for the info on Nepal, Prashant. That's certainly very hopeful, the transformation that has been effected in the Nepali Parliament.
By: Nivedita Menon on June 8, 2009
at 4:51 PM
I am sure I will end up irritating you but here goes any way.
But that is is precisely my point – it is in order to counter this [OBC] rise that "women" are being touted across the board from BJP to CPM.
How so? If a constituency is reserved for women, then all candidates will have to be women. In effect, being a woman will play no role in the election in that constituency and the battle will be fought along other lines (like caste).
The only way I can understand your point is if there is a further assertion that the pool of OBC/Dalit/Muslim women candidates is much smaller than that of women candidiates from "forward" castes because those communities are more socially conservative. (Other factors may be at play too.) The full argument would then be as follows: "Reserving a constituency for women biases the outcome in favour of women from forward castes because OBC/Dalit/Muslim women are less likely to stand as candidates since they are, on average, less well-educated and also socially more conservative. The Women's Representation Bill is thus nothing more than a ploy to reduce the number of OBC representatives."
Perhaps. But, if one looks at the experience of OBC men, then that advantage (if at all) is going to be temporary at best. I am sure you know better than me that while the first OBC Chief Minister of Bihar was Karpoori Thakur in 1977, there have been none since Laloo and none (from the upper castes) who even remotely looks capable of taking over the post now. The Maithili Brahmins and the Bhumihars who dominated Bihar's politics upto 1977 are nowhere in the picture now. Similarly, for UP, I think.
If at all the Women's Bill is aimed to do what you suggest, then all it will buy the proponents is a few more years. Perhaps not even that. May I gently also note that cynical political manipulation is not the exclusive preserve of upper castes, nor of men. Yes, they have been and are fully capable of such manipulation but then so are Mulayam, Mayawati and last but not least, Narendra Modi. The point is that there may be a hidden cynical agenda in the opposition to the Women's Representation Bill also.
For the record, I don't like the bill myself but that's a separate story.
By: suresh on June 8, 2009
at 10:03 PM
Nivi, I'd say there should be over-all OBC reservation in Parliament concurrent with SC/ST reservation. Just as SC/ST reservation would ensure Dalit women representation would go up if the women's bill is assed, so would OBC…
By: Shivam Vij on June 8, 2009
at 11:16 PM
Rageina, this 50:50 + sub-reservation for every caste idea is great. I suggest we add to it reservation to political parties on the basis of membership and we could get rid of the whole election process, saving thousands of crores.
By: Mukund on June 9, 2009
at 1:23 AM
Nivedita, you state that "by and large, reservations for women have strengthened the entrenched power of the dominant caste groups of the area. That is, men of less dominant castes in PRI have been replaced by women of the dominant castes"
How do you logically derive the second sentence from the first. There is no indication, that the men being replaced belong to less dominant castes.
The study seems to suggest that women of the dominant caste of the AREA gains. Whereas, you are trying to imply, women of dominant caste gain, at the expense of men of less dominant caste in GENERAL. This is misrepresenting facts. Also if the studies you are pointing to are true, there is no need to worry, as we all know that forward caste/other elitist groups form minuscule percentage of Indian population. Even in UP which has the highest %, the forward caste is only about 15% of population. So naturally the women from BC/OBCs will gain the most.
PS: When you quote a study, you need to cite it to make your argument more authentic, so that others can verify what you are stating as a fact.
By: Mukund on June 9, 2009
at 1:40 AM
Nivedita: अगर महिला एक अमूर्त (abstract) केटेगरी है तो क्या यही एससी, एसटी और ओबीसी के बारे में भी सच नहीं है? (इनके भीतर महिला-पुरूष. वर्ग आदि)। किस छोटी सी छोटी केटेगरी को मूर्त कहा जाए?
परकटी महिला वाली बात लफ्फाजी के स्तर पर ही है। क्या मायावती छोटे बालों के स्तर से परकटी महिला नहीं है? क्या शरद यादव की पत्नी और बेटी भी परकटी नहीं हैं? ( यह बात कूमी कपूर के साथ एक्सप्रेस में छपे पुराने इंटरव्यू में शरद यादव ने खुद मानी थी)
हिंदी में यह लफ्फाजी 'अट भी मेरी पट भी मेरी चंटी, मेरे बाप की' के अंदाज में होती है, जहां इसके ठीक उलट जब कोई पुरूष या महिला स्थापित सत्ता को चुनौती देती है तो कहा जाता है कि उसके 'पर निकल आए हैं'।
परकटी का एकमात्र मायना अभिजात्य महिला नहीं हो सकता। पिछड़े वर्ग की भी पढ़ी-लिखी महिला को ऐसा कहा जा सकता है। 1980 मैं छत्तीसगढ़ के पिथौड़ा नामक गांव( जो अब ग्राम पंचायत से पालिका हो गई है) में सबसे पहली बार मैंने यह शब्द एक साधारण से परिवार की बारहवीं में पढ़ने वाली दो बहनों के बारे में उस नगर के मारवाड़ी सेठों के लड़कों से सुना था।
भाजपा इसका समर्थन कर रही है, यह कोई कसौटी नहीं हो सकती कि इसीलिए यह ओबीसी विरोधी कदम है। भाजपा ने बाद में मंडल के बारे में सुप्रीम कोर्ट के फैसले को माना था और शैक्षिणक आरक्षण का तीखा विरोध नहीं किया था। भाजपा को भी लोकतंत्र के भीतर काम करते हुए वैधता जुटाने के लिए कुछ न कुछ करना ही पड़ेगा। इसको हमेशा किसी साजिश से क्यों जोड़ कर देखा जाए।
जहां तक टिकट देने का सवाल है, पंचायत में भी आरक्षण देने के पहले महिलाओं को टिकट कहां मिलता था? एक तरह का आरक्षण कई बार दूसरे तरह के आरक्षण की जगह बनाता है। जेएनयू के कदम की वजह जो हो आप इसके पक्ष में हैं या विरोध में? किसी कदम के समर्थन के लिए नीयत का सवाल हमेशा अहम नहीं होता। आरक्षण के बारे में भी लोग इसके पीछे की वोट बैंक राजनीति का हवाला देते हैं।
पंचायती राज संस्थाओं में गांव एक छोटी इकाई होता है। वहां कई बार पर्दा या शिक्षा की कमी के कारण ओबीसी के बीच से मजबूत उम्मीदवार मिलना मुश्किल हो सकता है। मगर क्या पंचायत के स्तर की तुलना लोकसभा के स्तर से कर किसी निष्कर्ष तक पहुंचना ठीक है?
जो बात शिवम विज ने उठाई है कि जब पुरुषों के लिए संसद में ओबीसी आरक्षण की मांग नहीं है तो ओबीसी नेताओं की इस असुरक्षा को क्या कहा जाए? वैसे 1996 में तेलुगु देशम और एआईडीएमके ने इस विधेयक को समर्थन दिया था। वे भी मोटे तौर पर ओबीसी की ही पार्टियां हैं, इसलिए शरद-लालू जुगलबंदी के और किसी कारण की तलाश शायद करनी पड़े।
By: Ishwar dost on June 10, 2009
at 1:43 AM
Actually, Nivedita I'd be grateful if you could explain what you meant by women from the dominant caste being overrepresented in reserved seats. OBC's unlike Muslims are not underrepresented in parliament. Their rise as Jaffrelot points out is due to a number of factors, none of which are destabilized by this bill. Since demography and local networks dominate decisions to nominate candidates, its unlikely that the party will nominate say a Brahman woman in a OBC majority constituency.
Interestingly (and I am not sure what to make of thsi statistic) a greater proportion of reserved SC seats are occupied by women as opposed to general seats. Four of the nine women ministers are dalits.
Interestingly, UP and Rajasthan have among the largest number of female MPs, comapred to "progressive" Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Kerala has no women MPs.
By: Rohit on June 10, 2009
at 7:08 AM
I'd just like a link to these studies of panchayat reservations. I'm familiar with a few and i don't remember them saying what they say you say. Could you give us a couple of references, since your argument pretty much hinges on that claim?
By: MS on June 10, 2009
at 1:02 PM
Missed checking mail for a couple of days, and it looks like a very serious debate has developed. Thank you all (you too, Suresh :))
Okay, first of all, I have actually written at length on this earlier, and I just pulled out the core of the argument from that essay – one version titled "The Elusive 'Woman': Feminism and the Women's Reservation Bill", Economic and Political Weekly, October 21-27/October 28-November 3, 2000; and a slightly expanded version as a chapter in my book "Recovering Subversion. Feminist Politics beyond the Law" (Permanent Black Delhi and Univ. of Illinois Press 2004).
What happens when you briefly lay out the core of an argument, esp for a place like a blog, is that all the nuances get ironed out, and of course, things like references.
So let me make just a few brief clarifications here, and, with your indulgence, separately post that chapter from my book, in case somebody is interested!
1. As the title of my book indicates, I am opposed to treating the law as a magic wand to bring about fundamental social transformations. So my engagement with this Bill is more about pointing to the limits of the law, tending as it does, to congeal identities. (Re Suresh, "I am not a fan of the Bill." Nor am I)
2. Some of the references I came across at the time, which is what I have in mind now, are cited by Janaki Nair, "An Important Springboard", in a special issue of the journal "Seminar" on the WRB – No. 457, September 1997. (They include Indira Hirway, "Panchayati raj at the crossroads" EPW Vol XXIV No. 29 1989 and Utsahi Mahila Abhyudaya in UMA Prachar April-June 1996.) That issue of Seminar also has a very early version of the essay I am going to post on kafila. (We must remember that the experiment in WR at PRI level in many states pre-dates the Constitutional Amendments of 1992-3 that made it mandatory all over India).
By now there must be many more studies available, but we do need to find those that focus on changes in caste-class equations rather than only on impact on women.
3. Which is why, MS – it's quite possible that all studies on the functioning of WR in PRI do not focus on this aspect. Depends on what question the study is asking – mostly they tend to look, naturally of course, at how women themselves, esp the women actually elected, have been affected. If the study does not ask questions about changes in caste-class equations as a result of WR, then that factor will simply not emerge.
4. In any case, I dont believe my argument "pretty much hinges" (MS) on the claim of dominant groups' power *actually* becoming entrenched. For example, I'm prepared to find more recent studies that show a reversal of that trend.
5. Therefore, my question, as a political theorist, is this: what are the effects the proponents and opponents of the Bill seem to *expect*, and what does that say for the caste/gender equation in contemporary India?
The timing of the first version of the Bill is significant – 1996. At that point, the OBC influx into Parliament throughout the 1980's had transformed it completely (all references in the soon-to-be posted chapter!), and the Mandal Commission recommendations had recently been implemented in govt. services.
Why I would expect a general quota for women to reverse this trend in Parliament would be the very reason why certain groups require reservations in the first place. An immediate blanket reservation can be expected to put in place into one-third of seats in the LS, the most well-equipped sections of women, i.e. upper-caste, upper-class women. For five years at least. (So Suresh, my point here is that a party will field a candidate they think most likely to win, i.e. the same reason they do not field women candidates generally. And such candidates are likely to be uc/uc, for historical reasons).
Now, what will actually happen during elections no-one can tell. The results of the last two General Elections should have taught us that poll predictions are extremely uncertain, and that psephology is an overrated branch of knowledge production. So let us not even go into all the speculations about which castes parties will nominate etc., because all sorts of local factors come into play, and for example, to assume that
"it is unlikely a party will nominate a Brahmin in an OBC constituency" (Rohit) is quite unfounded. If that were the case, no Brahmin would ever be nominated by any party, because there simply is no Brahmin-majority constituency!
6. Hence my question – why the general outrage at the idea of quotas-within-quotas? It is generally dismissed as a ruse to delay the Bill, but this would delay the Bill only if you let it, and by Goddess, it has been allowed to do so! The damn thing has been hanging for 13 years, when if the qwq position had been assented to, perhaps it would have been passed long ago. In fact, it now looks like all the parties are prepared to dilute the 33% to 20% rather than accept OBC quotas!
Why are they prepared to have less women in Parliament rather than 33% of whom some percent are OBC women? If women is what you want, women is what you will get, even with qwq! But you are prepared to have fewer women in Parl rather than OBC women!
The calculations are electoral – the OBC parties and the OBC vote are not available to any of the major parties supporting the Bill.
(Interestingly, inside BJP, Uma Bharati (she was then in it) was in favour of caste-based quotas EVEN FOR MUSLIMS!
Surprise, surprise, she herself is of course a Lodha, an OBC caste.)
So my speculations on what will happen in terms of who will actually be nominated, elected etc. are as good or as bad as all of yours. What I find most interesting is that fact that "women" are being touted as the raison d'etre of the Bill, when women seem to be most expendable when it comes to the caste factor.
7. Ishwar, maaf kijiye, mein Hindi mein type nahin kar sakti, isliye roman lipi mein jawab doongi.
a) Zahir hai ki jab Sharad Yadav ne voh muhavra istemaal kiya, toh voh koi unka moulik avishkar nahin tha, voh aise shabd hain jo ki aam taur se istemaal mein hain. Zaroor aisi mahilaen, jinmein atmavishwas hai aur jo sahasi hain, vagairah, har jati aur varg mein maujood hain – lekin yeh bhi sach hai ki varg aur jati ke phayde bade hain, isliye aarakshan ki zaroorat bhi padti hai!
b) Rahi amoortuta ki baat – mein maanti hoon ki har asmita ko gadhne ke liye kaee aur pahluon ko hashiye par karna padta hai, lihaza har asmita ek tarah se amurt hi hai. Yahi vajah hai ki mera zyaada vishwas nahin hai "kanoon" par, jo ki har aisi asmita ko sthir aur sthayi bana deta hai.
c) BJP ka samarthan maatr nahin hai koi vajah is vidheyak ko shaq ki nazaron se dekhne ki, lekin kya vajah hai ki BJP iski itni badi samarthak hai – kya yeh sawal nahin uth khada hota? Theek isi tarah BJP ke Saman Nagrik Sanhita (Uniform Civil Code) ka samarthan karna, mahila andolan ke liye gehre aatmachintan ki vajah bani, aur ab hum "samanta" aur "gender-adhaarit nyay" mein fark karne lage hain.
Abhi tak qwq ke khilaf koi thos tark nahin aaya hai hamare saamne. Aap ne bhi koi aisa tark nahi diya hai, siwaay iske ke ki jab mardon ke liye aarakshan nahin hai, streeyon ke liye kyon ho. Zahir hai ki bina aarakshan ke, OBC mard seatein jeet rahe hain, yahi toh mushkil hai, baaki saari partiyon ke liye!
By: Nivedita Menon on June 12, 2009
at 11:27 AM
[...] Feminist Politics Beyond the Law – that I referred to in response to demands for references on my previous post on the WRB. I do apologize to those (including fellow-kafilaites!) who may rightly feel I have said enough [...]
By: Reservations for Women: 'Am I That Name?' « Kafila on June 12, 2009
at 12:52 PM
[...] seems Chavez gifted him Lenin's What is to be done?How Chavez snubbed Mario Vargas llosaAren't OBC women also women? at [...]
By: Reading, of late « a reader's words on June 13, 2009
at 3:33 PM
Shivam, re your comment: "there should be over-all OBC reservation in Parliament concurrent with SC/ST reservation. Just as SC/ST reservation would ensure Dalit women representation would go up if the women's bill is passed, so would OBC…"
As far as I know, in the current proposal of 33% reservation for women, there is a separate SC/ST quota within it as per constitutional requirement, IN ADDITION to the 22.5 in Parliament as a whole.
By: Nivedita Menon on June 15, 2009
at 9:23 AM
that's great then!
By: Shivam Vij on June 15, 2009
at 10:27 AM
Why I would expect a general quota for women to reverse this trend [of increasing OBC representation] in Parliament would be the very reason why certain groups require reservations in the first place. An immediate blanket reservation can be expected to put in place into one-third of seats in the LS, the most well-equipped sections of women, i.e. upper-caste, upper-class women. For five years at least.
Yes, quite likely. However, this is unlikely to be anything more than temporary (as I wrote previously) if the experience of OBC men is anything to go by. We know that in UP and Bihar, it took OBC men some time to assert themselves politically but once it happened, there was no looking back because the numerical strength is on the side of the OBCs. What makes you think that OBC women will not similarly put an end to any temporary dominance of the upper caste/class women?
Secondly, your writing suggests that a "gain" of upper caste/class women, if it comes at the "expense" of OBC men, is necessarily bad. Why? How do we compare gender discrimination suffered by upper caste women and caste discrimination suffered by OBC men? Is there a way for saying that "this" discrimination is worse than "that" discrimination? Any way, if the objective is to "protect" the gains of OBC men, then, as Shivam suggests, we need a separate quota for OBC men too.
Thirdly, as Andre Beteille has been saying for a long time (including today's Times of India), the very nature of a quota system is such that it targets the relatively well-off among the targeted group. This aspect is not going to change even if you have a separate OBC quota for women. For one, the OBCs are not homogeneous and what we will most likely see – as we have seen elsewhere – is that a few groups among the OBCs will corner the benefits. The problems and conflicts that we have seen elsewhere will probably appear here as well.
Again, to clarify: I don't like the WRB but I am not taking a position on that here. I am just responding to two issues that Nivedita brought up: (i) the upper class/caste women v/s OBC men conflict, and (ii) the argument that blanket reservations will result in upper caste/class women cornering all the benefits.
By: suresh on June 15, 2009
at 4:50 PM
Suresh: "as Andre Beteille has been saying for a long time (including today's Times of India), the very nature of a quota system is such that it targets the relatively well-off among the targeted group."
This is the creamy layer argument which in my opinion, is deeply flawed. Reservations to institutions of higher education, jobs etc. will HAVE to target the relatively better off. After all, there is a reason why it is the creamy layer of the general category too, that gets into colleges and jobs. It is only those who have already had some access to schools etc, and been able to amass some "cultural capital" who can even hope to make it to college, jobs and so on. If you exclude the "creamy layer" from reservations, you will very conveniently, have reserved seats going unfilled.
By the way, I wouldn't see Beteille's views on reservations as those of an "objective" sociologist. His feelings against reservation and Dalit politics are so deep-rooted and visceral that he argued vociferously during the debate on taking caste to the UN Convention on racism (in Durban and more recently, in Geneva), that race and caste cannot be equated because caste is a sociological category while race is biological. Now, such a statement would not be made by a sociology undergraduate student, that race is "biological"! It is astonishing that Beteille's desire to use all possible arguments to keep caste discrimination "inside the home", as it were, should have pushed him to putting his own academic credentials into question.
In short, Beteille and creamy layer arguments in general are anti-reservation, and as I said right in the beginning, that issue for me is beyond debate. I am simply not interested in defending reservations as such – we need them if we believe in social justice, and I'm glad they are here to stay. I only want to debate how to make them more effective, reflect more socio-political identities etc.
As to whether we can say "this" discrimination is worse than "that", it is precisely because we cannot, that complicated ideas like qwq and so are being considered. If we could simply say all women are oppressed and all men are not, or something quick and simple like that, these discussions would not be necessary.
By: Nivedita Menon on June 16, 2009
at 10:09 AM
Wonder, wonder, Suresh that you (and Beteille) have discovered that OBCs are not a homogenous category. And the 'general category' or the the open category? That is homogenous? Would you be where you were – or any of us – if we had not cornered the seats of 80 percent of the poorer upper castes and others? How is it that this talk of creamy layer only becomes relevant when you talk about dalits and OBCs? May be we should possibly think of a way of economic reservation within the general quota. By the way, your perverse logic of 'numerical strength being in the favour of OBC men' has not worked in the case of the poor of any category – who are the largest in numbers anyway. Ultimately, it is a question of power not numbers.
By: Yabasta on June 16, 2009
at 12:11 PM
I'm posting an article I've written, based on the editorial of the weekly news magazine of the CPI(ML) (Liberation), the ML Update, Vol 12, No. 24, 16-22 June 2009.) Reading the posts here helped me clarify my thoughts on the issue quite a bit, so thanks to all here…
Revisiting the Women's Reservation Debate
Once again, the debate over Women's Reservation Bill has resurfaced, in the wake of the President's speech promising to enact 33% quota for women in assemblies and parliament as well as 50% quota in panchayats. After 13 years of delays and vacillations, the women's movement and progressive forces are naturally demanding that the Government and main ruling parties, who no longer have any excuse not to enact the Bill, walk their talk this time without any further delay.
The cacophony of misogynistic rhetoric voiced against the Bill since 1996, and revived this time around, has rightly invited outrage. However, let us set aside the anti-women baggage for a while, and re-examine the main case against the Bill, as articulated mainly by parties and leaders claiming to represent the dalits and OBCs. The crux of the debate is: will the Women's Bill in its present form militate against OBC representation in parliament and benefit only elite, privileged women, and must it therefore include a quota within quota for OBC women, as a precondition for passing the Bill?
Does the women's quota indeed represent a threat to political representation of oppressed and backward castes?
In the first place, we must note that provision has already been made, in the Bill, for 33% quota for women within the existing 22% SC/ST quota. So Mulayam Singh's warning to the (dalit woman) Speaker in his parliamentary diatribe against the Bill, that the Bill, if enacted, would prevent her own entry into Parliament, is obviously baseless.
The question of quota within quota for OBC women is more complicated – mainly because of the fact that there is no existing OBC quota at any level in representative institutions. The question of OBC quota in assemblies and parliament is being brought up only in response to the Women's Bill. Even in Bihar, where the state government headed by the JD(U) (the party of Sharad Yadav, the most vocal opponent of the Women's Bill) has instituted 50% quota for women in panchayats, there is a quota within quota for women from SC/ST and Most Backward Castes (MBCs), not for OBCs as such.
OBC representation in assemblies and parliament has, by all accounts, increased significantly since the 1980s. If 33% seats are reserved for women, will it result in a decline in OBC representation? Won't OBC women win seats which OBC men have been winning? No, say the opponents of the Bill – arguing that elite, educated, privileged, usually upper caste women will steal a march over OBC women. The lion's share of the benefits of women's quota, they say, will accrue to the more privileged upper caste women.
This argument seems to be founded on a fallacy about the nature of electoral and political mechanisms. In reservation in general, it is true, where it is individuals who compete for limited seats – in jobs or education – it is the more privileged who are likely to corner the lion's share of quotas. For instance, in the case of OBC quota, intended to correct the underrepresentation of OBCs in jobs and higher education, working class poor and women from these castes are less likely to avail benefits as compared to those from the same castes who are relatively more privileged educationally and economically. But the question arises: while OBCs continue to be underrepresented in jobs and higher education, necessitating the OBC quota, how come they are fairly well represented in parliament and many assemblies? Why has the upper caste domination in Indian politics been decisively broken, without any quota? The reason is that OBC political forces have ridden a wave of popular social mobilization that has asserted itself since the 1980s. Politics – including electoral politics – is all about contending social mobilizations, where the caliber and privileges of individual candidates is relatively secondary. This is the reason why a Phoolan Devi (the former bandit) won electoral battles even without any OBC quota. It is one matter that parties have been reluctant to field such women candidates, thus necessitating a women's quota, but the example of Phoolan Devi suggests that when given a chance, OBC women have not fared worse than their male counterparts in electoral battles. The same social forces which benefited male OBC leaders has played in their favour too, and their lack of educational privilege has not come in the way of electoral success. The point is that politics is not a personality contest, and there is simply no reason why OBC women should fare badly in comparison with upper caste women once the Women's Bill is brought into effect. Even the apprehension that OBC women might be denied tickets because they would be seen as less 'winnable' than more privileged women, doesn't hold water. Winnability, in our electoral process, is decided less by individual privilege alone – and more by the position of candidate and party in the social balance of forces. It is this which is the biggest factor in parties' decisions to field candidates. There is no reason why a party, in a constituency where their position in the social balance would favour an OBC candidate, would choose a non-OBC candidate in case the seat is reserved for women. Reservation for women would not alter the social balance of forces – it would only eliminate the aspect of gender discrimination from the social equation in that particular election.
Why is OBC quota proposed only in response to the Women's Bill, while it is not seen as necessary in general? Opponents of the Bill retort that it is precisely to counter the threat of growing OBC assertion in politics that the upper caste dominated parties have embraced the Women's Bill. Again, such an argument is based on a fallacious and superficial understanding of the basis of the increased OBC representation in politics. OBC political assertion reflects the growing assertion of an emergent kulak class in agrarian India. To reduce it to the assertion of the marginalised 'backward castes' alone would be to ignore that it also reflects the assertion of a powerful emergent landed class, which represents a more privileged layer within the backward castes, while, however, positioning itself as the voice of the genuine social aspirations of the backward castes as a whole. The ruling class including the dominant national ruling parties have, to a large extent, accommodated this kulak class and its political representatives, which have not proved in any way a hurdle to the economic and social policy thrust of other ruling class parties. The initial expectations from some quarters, that these parties would prove a hurdle to communal politics or to neoliberal economic policy have been badly belied. Tensions might remain between powerful 'regional' players and national formations, but the latter, while they might seek to replace the regional outfits, will do so by accommodating the OBC-kulak forces rather than by jettisoning them. Moreover, the Women's Bill is highly unlikely to overturn the power of the agrarian kulak class in the balance of social forces. Rather, the same political logic and process that has benefited OBC male leaders is likely to benefit OBC women as well.
Sharad Yadav, in a recent interview in Tehelka, rephrased his 'parkati' brand of argument against educated, urbanised women leaders, in more palatable and even words. He said Sita-Savitri were usually seen as representative of Indian women, and he instead wanted the Draupadis – women who dared to fight Mahabharatas for justice – to find political representation. "If the weaker sections of the society are not included, only people like Sushma Swaraj and Brinda Karat will be seen in the Lok Sabha, not the true Draupadis who represent the real India," he said. Brave words. But there is a problem: Brinda Karat, a prominent leader of the left-led women's movement, cannot be called an advocate of 'Sati-Savitri' even by her worst detractors. In contrast to the considerable efforts of the women's movement and the Left-led women's groups, what has Sharad Yadav or his party ever done to mobilize the Draupadis against patriarchies? The accusation of being 'elite' and cut off from Indian culture and social reality is a favourite one to level against women's movement activists – and Sushma Swaraj would happily join Sharad Yadav in thus branding the women's movement as un-Indian! Such accusations ignore the fact that if women's movement leaders from middle class, educated backgrounds represent one kind of relative privilege in respect to their working class sisters, politicians of ruling class parties – including OBC leaders from kulak backgrounds, also represent considerable class (and gender) privilege, and are not unmediated 'natural' representatives of 'deprivation'. The idea that educated middle class women – as leaders of the women's movement or as representatives in political are somehow less authentic and less representative of the 'real Indian women' needs to be challenged very strongly, because such arguments are inevitably deployed to legitimize patriarchies in the name of 'Indian culture,' falsely suggesting that 'authentic' Indian women are those who accept and embrace such patriarchies.
It is not our case that 'OBC parties' and leaders like Sharad Yadav or Mulayam are more anti-women than those from the Congress or BJP. Rather, they are pitting the OBC agenda against women, not simply because they are anti-women or even because they feel more threat from the Women's Bill, but because they perceive a political benefit in flaunting purported concern for OBCs. Sharad Yadav, for instance, is clearly seeking to use the Women's Bill issue as a timely tool in his bid to pose as OBC messiah and step into the shoes left vacant by the decline of Laloo Yadav. Today, in any case, there is no unity even in the camp of OBC leaders and parties, on the 'quota within quota' position. Nitish Kumar of the JD(U) has strategically chosen not to endorse his party colleague Sharad Yadav's stand on the Women's Bill. In Parliament, Mulayam Singh too said not a word about 'quota within quota' for OBC women, choosing instead to suggest the even weaker mechanism of a party-wise quota of 20% tickets to women candidates.
In his speech in Parliament, Mulayam Singh said that with 22% reserved for SC/STs, and 33% for women, there would be no space left for upper castes and backward castes. He said that leaders like Advani, Joshi, and others had reached the Lok Sabha through hard struggles, and the Women's Bill would 'destroy this leadership.' He also employed the usual misogynistic spectre of women in parliament relegating men to domestic work, saying "those thumping tables today will tomorrow be left thumping mattresses at home," and lamented the 'state of affairs' where women like Sonia, Mamata, Jayalalitha and Mayawati were calling the shots everywhere. Interestingly, these arguments were clearly targeted not just at OBCs but specifically at upper caste leaders (even naming them), and even more interestingly, his implication that women elected through quotas would not be the product of 'hard struggles' and would destroy able leadership, actually echoes the meritocratic arguments posed by protestors against OBC quotas. Clearly, be it Sharad Yadav or Mulayam, the arguments against the Bill are not just emanating from 'concern for OBC representation', but rather these leaders have complex and distinct motivations that have necessitated different articulations and emphases at different political junctures.
We do not oppose a 'quota within quota' on principle, nor do we reject it on the spurious argument that 'women' are an undifferentiated category uninflected by caste and class. In fact, it would be our greatest concern that women from oppressed castes and classes get their share of representation. What are objectionable are the attempts to use the OBC issue as a smokescreen to stall the Women's Bill. To employ an analogy: would it not have been highly objectionable if the implementation of Mandal recommendations on OBC quotas in jobs and education had been stalled for years on the pretext that a quota within quota for OBC women, or for that matter economically deprived OBC students and youth, was a precondition, to accommodate the apprehension that these sections might be less able to benefit?
The need of the hour now is to pass the Women's Bill in its present form without a moment's further delay. If indeed experience reveals that women's reservation is resulting in any appreciable decline in OBC representation, OBC quota in assemblies and parliament, in general as well as within the women's quota, can be accommodated through amendment.
By: Kavita Krishnan on June 17, 2009
at 1:10 PM
It is sad to read all these coments, looks like social reformists from JNU are writing these comments. Fact is any kind of reservation will perpetuate caste/gender discrimination. In a progressive society principles of inclusion and exclusion should apply to all and not to certain categories. A quota system results in mediocre system damaging the nation. Look at US, it never introduced quota system. need of hour is affirmative actions for the have nots. For God sake dont include OBC reservations for discussions as this is the biggest fraud inflicted upon this country by the yadvas, kurmis, south Indian non brahmins. India is paying for it and continue to pay for it
http://kafila.org/2009/06/07/and-arent-obc-women-women-loud-thinking-on-the-womens-reservation-bill/