Women’s Movement Splits on the Reservation Bill
This article was first published in the print edition of Manushi Journal. (Issue-107, Jul-Aug 1998)
After much fireworks, the bill to provide 33 per cent reservation for women in Parliament and state legislatures has been put on the back-burner, which is exactly where it belongs. The pro- reservation lobby is determined to keep the issue alive. Just as well. It is good to keep it alive as an idea, as an issue to be resolved. However, it would have been disastrous if that foolishly conceived scheme of reservations had actually become part of our electoral law.
For a long time any legislation which claimed to be pro-women, no matter how stupid and harmful in substance, sailed through Parliament because any legislative intitiative claiming to help women enjoyed a moral aura. This moral vantage ground has unfortunately been severely eroded thanks to the short-
sighted, thoughtless politics of many of our leaders both women and men…