Women's quota becomes a mirage within BJP

THE Women's Reservation Bill, 2023, seeking to reserve one-third of the seats in the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies for women, exists as statute after having had a turbulent past, but it still awaits implementation. The wait could be longer than expected in view of Home Minister Amit Shah's statement that it would happen after 2029.However, twice in the past, the BJP claimed that it would set aside 33 per cent seats for women in the party organisation at both national and state levels. Once, in 2010, when its leaders felt that Sonia Gandhi and the Congress had stolen a march over the Opposition in grandstanding over the passage of the Women's Bill in the Rajya Sabha. And, second, when the Bill became a law, but with a vaguely worded qualifier of augmenting women's presence in the organisational structures, with no number or percentage specified.The closest the BJP came to fulfilling the promise was in 2010 under Nitin Gadkari's presidency. Even as Sushma Swaraj then cautioned that the quality of women inductees was as important as their number, if not more, the BJP could not resist the urge to infuse glamour in the gender parity exercise. The party inducted Bollywood and TV stars like Hema Malini, Smriti Irani and Kirron Kher along with the more rooted leaders like Vasundhara Raje (Rajasthan), Bijoya Chakravarty (Assam) and Karuna Shukla (Chhattisgarh).In 2015, when Shah was appointed BJP president, he pruned women's representation in the core national executive team. He dropped Hema Malini and Smriti, who by then was in the Union Cabinet. Did the move foretell the shape of things to come? The BJP might gloat over the fact that the Women's Bill was passed during its regime, but data on gender presence, both in its party hierarchy and government, is uninspiring as it is nowhere close to the promised 33 per cent quota.In the central apparatus, there is not a single woman general secretary — the most powerful post after the party president’s — but five of the 11 vice-presidents — an ornamental office with no executive mandate — are women. While two of the 11 national secretaries are women, of the seven morchas or ancillary outfits, only the mahila morcha is headed (naturally) by a woman. The 11-member parliamentary board — the apex decision-making body — has just one woman and the 14-member central election committee has two.The BJP spokespersons' panel of 30, which once sizzled and sparkled with spunky women, today has just four — Sanju Verma, Aparajita Sarangi, Shazia Ilmi and Bharti Ghosh.The Central Cabinet picture is more dismal. Of the 30 cabinet ministers (excluding PM Narendra Modi), only two — Nirmala Sitharaman and Annapurna Devi — are women; of the five junior ministers with independent charge, there is no woman and of the 41 junior ministers reporting to seniors, five are women, including Anupriya Singh Patel of the Apna Dal, an ally. That's 33 per cent for you…. !Think of Smriti Irani and recall how the BJP once welcomed, and not merely tolerated, spirited women. Whether Smriti has left politics for good will become clear only if she is not given a ticket in the next Lok Sabha poll. After losing Amethi in 2024, it was rumoured that she tried hard to secure a Rajya Sabha berth from Telangana, but was passed over. She recently made a well-publicised re-entry into the reincarnated TV soap opera, ‘Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’, which, in 1999, was her passport to celebrityhood.Smriti caught the attention of a former leader from Mumbai, who was known to snag star actors, when the BJP was desperately craving validation from celebrities. But her baptism in politics was highly controversial.In 2004, when the BJP's anti-Modi coterie actively sought to put him down, it used Smriti as its sounding board. On TV, Smriti demanded that Modi should resign as the Gujarat CM to "salvage the BJP and Gujarat's prestige." If he didn't, she threatened to go on fast-unto-death from December 25, Atal Bihari Vajpayee's birthday. Smriti got an earful from LK Advani and some Gujarat leaders, after which she recanted.On Advani's intervention, Modi bought peace with Smriti and later facilitated a political career for her in the BJP that few newcomers could dream of — till her defeat from Amethi by a Gandhi family faithful, a setback the BJP barely recovered from.Smriti was not the only woman to make an impact after Sushma Swaraj’s generation. Recall the line-up of women BJP spokespersons and it is easy to see why their male counterparts then, like Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Shahnawaz Hussain, felt shaky about their jobs. From Nirmala's verbal thuds, as she took on the Congress' eloquent Manish Tewari, to Meenakshi Lekhi's sledgehammer blows, which came with an icy stare and a cold rebuke, and Kirron Kher's silken repartees, these women also made an impression. Their frequent appearances on prime-time talk shows on Gujarat and Modi and the Delhi gangrape incident earned them brownie points with the top leaders.Indeed, their presence as a gender power-pack was registered in the Gujarat elections after 2002, when Modi himself asked central leaders to give these women precedence over men to take on women civil rights activists.What happened to the feisty and voluble women? Barring Nirmala, where are the others today? Meenakshi, twice elected to the Lok Sabha from South Delhi, was denied a ticket in 2024; Kirron did not contest from Chandigarh, her former seat; Shaina NC, a prominent face on TV, joined the Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde). Except Sanju Verma, known for her belligerence, none from the current crop of women MPs and members has made a mark so far.The marginalisation of women possibly suits the men, whose cross-party bonding to block the Women's Bill was always apparent. Above all, it suits the RSS, which set up its women's wing — the Rashtra Sevika Samiti — decades after it came into being. But to be fair to the Sangh, it has allowed the BJP the prerogative to give its women members the space they seek to keep up with the times.Radhika Ramaseshan is a senior journalist based in New Delhi.

Women's quota becomes a mirage within BJP

Radhika Ramaseshan

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