Currently, India is tied for the 99^th spot with a small West African country called Benin in the world ranking for the percentage of women in the Parliament. Although India is a larger democracy in comparison to Benin, it took nearly 14 years for our political leaders to take concrete action. A shame, considering 22 percent and 27 percent of the Parliaments in Pakistan and Afghanistan, respectively, are women.  The Constitution (One Hundred and Eighth Amendment) Bill, 2008, popularly known as the Women’s Reservation Bill, was passed by the Rajya Sabha yesterday, with 186 votes in favor to reserve seats for women.  

History

In 1996, Deve Gowda, the then Prime Minister of India, proposed a legislation to reserve 33 percent seats in the Parliament and a bill was tabled on September 12, 1996.  Geeta Mukerjee (now deceased) was appointed as the Chairperson of the Joint Committee to solicit views and suggestions on the Women's Reservation Bill. The Bill has been unsuccessfully tabled 7 times since, by various governments. For the 8^th time in 2008, the then Law Minister, H.R. Bharadwaj, presented the Bill and Congress leader and lawyer Jayanthi Natarajan, was appointed as the Chairperson of the Committee to scrutinize the Bill. This committee included eminent lawyers such as Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Former Law Minister of Karanataka, D.B. Chandre Gowda.

When it was tabled before the Rajya Sabha this time, there was no shortage of drama. Some members of the opposition tried to assault Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari, which resulted in the suspension of 7 MPs.

Salient Features

The Women’s Reservation Bill will ensure that 33 percent of the seats are reserved for women in the Parliament and State Assemblies. Women from Scheduled Castes and Tribes will have a 1/3^rd reservation for women within the allocated reservation. This means that of the 141 women Parliamentarians, 40 will belong to Scheduled Castes and Tribes.

In some states, like Pondicherry, where there is a single Lok Sabha seat, the reservation has been spread across three general elections with the first one being reserved. Reservation for women will rotate and every constituency will see a woman representative in order to bring a 'horizontal democracy' across various segments of the country. Also, The Bill also proposes this reservation to be applicable only for a period of 15 years. The Committee has in its report proposed that this be increased by another 15 years. 

Political parties are divided on the voting. The Yadav group led by Lalu Prasad Yadav and Sharad Yadav along with Mulayam Singh opposed the Bill on this ground that the reservation system doesn’t benefit the lower strata of the society. The Bharatiya Samajwadi Party, led by Rajya Sabha member and former Advocate General of Uttar Pradesh, Satish Chandra Mishra abstained from voting on the ground that women have to be provided with a reservation of 50 percent since they constitute a proportional percentage of the population. 

While parties disagreed on the various forms and methods of the Bill, no party was vocally against the idea of reservation of women. PRS Legislative Research, an independent research initiative, has summarized the Bill in a legislative brief.

Speaking to Bar & Bench, M.R. Madhavan, part of the core team at PRS said, “This Bill is not very different in concept from the earlier Bill that was presented in 1996. However, there are some changes. The earlier Bill had mentioned that atleast 1/3^rd seats are to be reserved, but now is capped to 1/3^rd. Secondly, about the reservation to OBC women. Since there is no reservation for OBC men, it was difficult to implement the reservation for OBC women in the Parliament.”

This is not the end we will hear of the Bill. The next hurdle is the Lok Sabha and after that, the State Assemblies. It is assured that the sessions at the Lok Sabha will give sufficient competition to the spectacle at the Rajya Sabha.

Pavitra Anand had earlier written an article for Bar & Bench on the debate.