A confrontation over women

PRIME Minister Narendra Modi’s remarkable project at creating a “women constituency” in Indian politics, that hopes to override both caste and class, has been breathtaking in its imagination these past 12 years. Modi has done more to listen to the grievances of women — beginning with pushing for the replacement of smoke-filled chulhas still being used in tiny village homes with gas cylinders under the ‘Ujjwala’ scheme, to putting sums of money into their bank accounts, especially in the run-up to polls in their states — than any other male politician in recent times.

Why, then, has the Women’s Reservation Bill the PM piloted in the Lok Sabha, even called for a special session of Parliament in the middle of the ongoing Assembly election cycle, fallen apart? Don’t India’s women want to be part of a national ‘Nari Shakti’?

The answer is a complex one, of course, beginning with the fact that despite our deep devotion to our goddesses — from Durga to Kali, Saraswati and Lakshmi and several score more — you could ask why patriarchy has such deep roots in India. Certainly, we, women, are responsible for watering those roots and cutting the ground beneath our own feet. Why else would the female-male ratio in Haryana (879/1,000) and Punjab (895/1,000) and Delhi (868/1,000) — believe it or not, Chandigarh has the worst figures in the country, 818 women per 1,000 men — be at the absolute bottom of the national chart? (Haryana claims its figure has gone up to 914 per 1,000 men in the last year.)

Ask the question. Why is Punjab, with a population equivalent to Kerala, both 3 crore each, the second-worst performing state on the gender ratio scale in the country? Why do southern states led by Kerala (1,084), Tamil Nadu (996), Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka (both 993) do so well, compared to northern states, on this and several other socio-economic parameters?

Ask the second question. Why are Opposition parties against the Women’s Reservation Bill? Why didn’t they support PM Modi on what promises to be a fundamentally altering legislation that is bound to shake up Indian politics? Is the Opposition anti-women?

The Women’s Bill has had a long journey over the last few decades, as my colleague Surya Pillai so eloquently wrote some days ago. Fact is, that it was the Congress-led UPA in 2008, which introduced the Bill in the Rajya Sabha, and then ensured it passed in 2010, also in the Rajya Sabha, to prevent it from lapsing (when a Bill is passed in the Rajya Sabha, the House of Elders, it doesn’t lapse). The Congress realised that its own UPA was so badly divided over the Bill (RJD leader Sharad Yadav’s phrase ‘par kati mahilayein’ and Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav’s comment saying that if Parliament passed the Women’s Bill, it would open the doors to women “who invited catcalls and whistles” were manifestations of this divide), which meant that it would never have the numbers to pass in the Lok Sabhas of its time, so it did the next best thing.

That Congress push enabled the Modi government to pick up the baton in 2023 and pass an updated Bill. That’s why in 2023, the Congress and the rest of the Opposition supported the BJP in unanimously passing the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam.

And that should have been the message of the 2026 Bill as well — consensus. Just as Parliament came together in 2023 — only 2 MPs voted against the Bill — to support a 33 per cent women’s quota in Parliament, Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju and the rest of the senior BJP leadership should have called Opposition leaders and sought their support on the Women’s Bill this time around. Perhaps a joint parliamentary committee or a select committee in which all parties were represented could have debated all its clauses threadbare — should there be quotas within quotas for OBC and Dalits, for example? — and once a consensus was arrived at, the new Bill and its roadmap for implementation could have been put to the House.

Unfortunately, a consensus was neither sought nor won because there was no conversation. Parliament is so fractured these days, with MPs hurling insults at each other, that it takes a leader with a large heart and a small ego to be able to overcome both slights and underhand stratagems and reach out and talk to the other side.

Clearly, the Women’s Bill has met the same fate as the three farm laws promulgated in 2020. Just like the Centre was forced to take back the three laws, because there was little discussion or debate with farmer unions as well as political parties before they were promulgated — perhaps a pilot project in one corner of Punjab could have been devoted to that experiment, that may have led both sides to find a way — the Women’s Bill has failed to pass muster.

Let’s both of us write history, the PM could have told the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. The time has come for women to touch at least one-third of the sky. Women comprise 48-49 per cent of the country’s population, but let’s, as a start, give them 33 per cent. Yes, let’s, the Leader of Opposition could have answered.

Unfortunately, Modi and Amit Shah and Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi and K Kanimozhi said their set pieces. The extent to which Parliament has changed was clear when one or two Priyanka Gandhi-Amit Shah remarks — that in the old days would be considered the normal cut and thrust of parliamentary repartee — provoked the MPs into some laughter, some even nervously.

The lack of conversation between the Treasury and the Opposition benches led to a confrontation in Parliament — over women.

One last thing. Less than 24 hours before the constitutional amendment failed on Friday evening, the government had notified the 2023 Nari Shakti Adhiniyam on late Thursday evening. This means that the Act is alive and can be implemented any time.

In this fractured time, this last throw of the dice offers hope.