BackRandomizing women’s reservation in India
Empowering women through reservation alone will yield no success
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As a new Lok Sabha is about to be constituted, one can hope for the passage of some key legislations that a stable coalition at the centre is likely to pass. One among these pertains to the issue of women’s reservation in legislatures. A Bill to this effect was first introduced in 1996 but kept lapsing with the expiry of each Lok Sabha. However, during the present Lok Sabha, there has been a broad consensus, especially among the two main national parties, on reserving 33% of all constituencies in Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies for women. Even those parties opposing it, such as the Samajwadi Party, disagree only to the extent that they want further sub-quotas for other backward classes and minorities.
Yet, reservations of any kind are typically flawed and inefficient since they undermine merit. In a deeply divided society such as India, they also lead to tremendous social unrest. One factor that fuels such unrest is the belief that, once instituted, reservations are impossible to remove.
Given its scale, the reservation for women will perhaps be the most potent affirmative action programme till date with wide ranging ramifications for Indian polity and society. If implemented in a manner where seats are rotated randomly each election, two-thirds of all sitting legislators will be knocked off by design.
In a recent research paper by Mudit Kapoor and Shamika Ravi, Why So Few Women in Politics? Evidence from India, (Working paper, Indian School of Business, 2013) the authors studied 50 years of data to understand the way women have been represented in India. Two findings are salient. One, women tend to contest elections from constituencies where the gender ratio of voters is stacked against them. So women are more likely to contest in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh than in Kerala, which has a better sex ratio of voters. The reason being their concerns are reflected less adequately when the voter’s gender profile is against them. By the same logic, the data also shows that women are less likely to win from such disadvantaged constituencies.
These authors suggest that instead of randomly rotating the seats for women reservation, India should target the 33% of the constituencies where women are an electoral minority.
While it makes sense to apply some electoral logic to reservations of this kind, such a move is not a good idea for three reasons.
One, it assumes that reservations will continue forever. The last Bill that was passed by the Rajya Sabha set a deadline of 15 years. That essentially meant that each constituency in India will get one chance as a reserved constituency.
Two, by focusing on just one set of 33% constituencies, until the voter’s gender profile gets better, is a narrow way of looking at women’s empowerment. Moreover, since there is no evidence that women vote en bloc, the irony is that even in a reserved seat with adverse sex ratio of voters, the woman who supports the male agenda is likely to win.
Three, apart from the good that it may have done, each reservation has also created a dominant class within the reserved category. For instance, the issue of “creamy layer" within the SC/ST reservations has not been adequately addressed even now.
By restricting reservations to roughly the same set of constituencies and that too based on just one parameter of adverse sex ratio of voters is likely to accentuate the ill side-effects of reservation while restricting the benefits from spreading across the country.
While legislating any new reservation policy, the government will do well to reflect on the lessons learnt from the previous attempts. Empowering women and making space to develop women leaders in the country through reservation alone will at best result in middling success or worse further accentuate inequalities by creating an elite class among the disadvantaged. Any reservation must also go along with an equal emphasis on education and safety of women’s rights.
What is the best way to provide reservation in legislatures for women? Tell us at views@livemint.com
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