Indian Women On The March

An historic change in the offing; but India’s ruling party may be overreaching itself

YELLING dementedly, seven lawmakers mobbed the chairman of the Indian parliament's upper house on March 8th and tore at the document, containing the women's reservation bill, he was reading from. Yet the bill passed the next day, with the two-thirds majority needed to change India's constitution. With broad political support, including from the Congress party that leads India's coalition government and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the bill could soon clear the lower house and win the support it needs in at least 15 out of 28 state assemblies. The president would then sign it into law: imposing a 33% quota for women in India's federal and state assemblies.

This would be momentous, especially for India's half a billion, badly served women. Today's Lok Sabha, or House of the People, as India's lower chamber is known, contains 58 women, a record number, but fewer than 11% of the seats. By greatly boosting women's membership of India's legislatures, the proposed amendment, its supporters say, will also begin to make a dent in their more grievous suffering—in a country where female fetuses are often aborted, where wives are battered and women earn on average $1,200 a year, less than a third of the male average. A woman can take credit for this: Sonia Gandhi, Congress's leader, who has pushed the long-mothballed bill against a furious band of dissenters—of a kind that persuaded previous BJP- and Congress-led governments not to touch it.

Yet this triumph must be qualified. Even setting aside the question of how effective such affirmative action is—and an existing reservation of 22% of seats for wretched tribal Indians and dalits, Hinduism's former untouchables, is discouraging—the proposed amendment is flawed. With a supposed shelf-life of 15 years, it would cover a different tranche of seats in three successive parliamentary terms. So each time one-third of India's elected members would know they had no chance of being re-elected to the same seat. The women with reserved seats might also think their re-election hopes slim. This arrangement will discourage hard work on a constituency's behalf.

Another reasonable fear is that male politicians will put up biddable wives and daughters for election. They already do—as Mrs Gandhi hinted at when facing down one of the bill's main opponents, a former chief minister of northern Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, who, after being sent to prison, installed his wife to rule the state on his behalf. “Your wife has been chief minister. You have seven daughters. What's their view on the bill?” Mrs Gandhi asked him.

Unconvinced, Mr Yadav, whose party was among the hooligans in parliament, withdrew its support from the government. So did another north-Indian, low-caste party, Samajwadi. Both parties say the reservation should be dedicated to low-caste women. They also fear it will benefit educated, high-caste women, who are more likely to stand for Congress or the BJP. If, as expected, a third opponent of the bill, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the pro-dalit ruler of northern Uttar Pradesh state, also forsakes the government, it would be reduced to a majority of two in the Lok Sabha. In the worst case, it might even fail to get the necessary support for the budget announced on February 26th, and fall.

Recent grumbling from Congress's two biggest allies, West Bengal's Trinamul Congress (TC) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam of Tamil Nadu, have raised fears of this. Both parties oppose a proposal in the budget to raise petrol and diesel prices, and the TC abstained over the women's reservations bill. But the government will probably survive. Most opposition parties, including the BJP, still feel bruised after a thumping general-election victory by Congress last year, and none wants an election soon.

Yet the government's reduced support is worrying. Barely ten months after Congress was returned to power at the head of a more solid-looking coalition than it had previously led, it will struggle to pass any contentious legislation. And it will have to pay a heavy price to its, now indispensable, allies to do so. Liberal reform of India's state-controlled financial and overprotected retail sectors, for example, looks unlikelier than ever. In announcing the budget, Pranab Mukherjee, the finance minister, said India's priorities were to return to the annual 9% growth it achieved for most of the previous government's term, then “find the means to cross the double-digit growth barrier”. Without bold reforms, that will be impossible, and even 9% may be out of reach.

So the timing of Mrs Gandhi's push for women's quotas might seem reckless. It suggests an overestimation of Congress's strength, and the party's failure to reassure the TC's irascible leader, Mamata Banerjee, is careless at best. Mrs Gandhi has picked her political fights carefully since taking over her murdered husband Rajiv's party in 1998, and won most of them. So she may not be too perturbed. The economy looks healthy enough, with growth forecast at 7.2% for the financial year ending this month. She will be more concerned by the government's failure to introduce more crowd-pleasing measures, like the lavish welfare schemes, paid for with the bumper revenues that rapid growth affords, launched in its previous term. With this year's budget deficit nudging 10% of GDP, if you include the state governments, these are harder times. Yet reservations for women should at least please half the crowd.

Devout Congressmen, buoyed by last year's election result and the havoc it has played with the BJP, are pleased merely to see a Gandhi calling the shots. Many have a jaundiced view of Mrs Gandhi's technocratic prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and look forward to her 39-year-old son, Rahul, taking over. This is likely to happen in Congress's next government—but when that will come is hardly worth guessing. The party has been doing well. But with only 208 of the Lok Sabha's 545 seats, Congress, and its government, are weaker than its leaders seem to think.