Women reservation bill in India

The Congress led coalition government recently managed to get the Women's reservation bill passed in the 'Rajya Sabha' (upper house of the Indian Parliament) recently. As things go in India, this was not without the usual hungama - thanks to a bunch of illiterate goons masquerading as honorable MPs. But that aside, we should poise to think about what this bill is about. According to this bill, 1/3 of the seats in the parliament (drawn by lottery) will be reserved for women. So consider the following scenarios:

A. A male career politician spends 15-20 years of his life in winning the confidence of the voters from a certain constituency (less if your mother is the Congress president or if you dad or uncle died as chief minister) and gets elected to the parliament. Now once his term is over, he wont be able to contest that seat for the next 2 terms (by laws of statistics) - which means his political career is doomed. So what would he do in that situation, he will field a proxy woman candidate - conveniently, the wife. And our voters - timid cows as they are, will go and happily vote for the wife. So the letter of the law if obeyed - but does it really solve the problem for which this law is being proposed?

B. A second situation: suppose a woman candidate wins from a seat - not a proxy candidate as mentioned in Case 'A' above, but a real candidate who has worked hard in that area for development. Once her term is over, she won't be able to contest an election from the very seat that she has worked hard for - in the next 2 terms - which is 10 years! Who would remember her after 10 years - our collective memories are very short. We remember things until the next big tamasha. So, how does this bill emancipate women.

For some time, I thought a better thing (and harder thing) would be to make it mandatory for political parties to field 1/3 women candidates in the election at every level. So if the Congress party fields 450 candidates all over India in the general elections in a year, make it compulsory that at least 150 of them are women. This is fairer than drawing lotteries every time and ending up with Case A or B.

But all this begs a even more fundamental question - do we really need to reserve seats for women? I think this is a very patronizing attitude. We should strive to create equality at lower levels - at the grassroots level - at the level of political parties and organizations. This would be immediately be seen and felt by the common man. We don't need reservation for women or for any minorities at the highest level. But creating a level playing field is a much harder problem - and you will find hazaar kurta-clad buddhi jeevis speaking dime to a dozen in any number of TV channels how this bill will solve all our problems.

Shame on the Indian politicians. And shame on the Indian people - who don't and won't care who they elect to the Parliament. I think they deserve it.

As for the bill, my only hope is those 7 MPs who make hulla gulla in the parliament - I hope they make some more noise when the bill is placed in front of the Lok Sabha. If they cannot stop it - at least they can stall the process - albeit for all the wrong reasons.