Caste hurdles to women’s quota enforcement

The historic Women’s Reservation Bill has been passed by Lok Sabha with two thirds majority, and the Upper House will discuss it on Thursday.

No political party says that they are opposed to the Bill. Everyone says it should be implemented, but no one seems to be serious. They want to turn it into instant coffee type, saying 33 per cent of seats should be reserved for women in the upcoming Parliament and Assembly elections without waiting for delimitation.

The way the issue is being discussed in the new building of Parliament of India, it is very clear that everyone is vociferous; everyone wants to claim credit for championing the bill but no one has come up with any suggestion as to how it can be implemented in the shortest possible time and avoid legal complications.

Some felt that the acceptance of “quota within the quota” in the Bill is a regressive step and a clear case of an afterthought, laced with heavy political undertones. The exclusion of other backward classes in the “quota within the quota” has garnered new opposition to the Bill.

Rahul Gandhi tried to divert it into backward caste politics which shows the opportunistic politics over OBCs. He tried to make a point that there were only 3 OBC secretaries out of 90 in the core team which runs the government. He claimed he dug out something and found this. Well, if he wanted to nail the government, he should have come up with comparative statistics of the number of secretaries in the central government during all the previous governments.

Delimitation certainly is necessary to avoid legal complications because politics in India unfortunately rotate around caste and communities. All political parties seem to be of the view that the Women’s Reservation Bill 2023 has a great potential to attract voters along gender lines. Political acceptance, if reservations are implemented immediately, would not be an easy task. We have seen how RJD, SP and many others opposed such moves in the past.

Delimitation is the most scientific way to decide the quantum of who will get how many seats and avoid drawing legal challenges and would certainly meet the same fate as it happened in the past. Someone would go to a court of law saying that it has not been done in proper way and then no one knows what its fate would be. Some women activists view the quota system as “demeaning to women who have come up in a big way” in education, media, medicine, information technology, and a range of other fields, without asking for a level playing field at the start. But then, this is the subject of a broader debate.