The dissension over the reservation of seats for women in Parliament has brought out some curious aspects of negotiation and bargaining in our political life. On the face of it, all political parties are in favour of reservation, and none will speak against it openly. But much lies beneath the surface, and it is necessary to understand the inner dynamics underlying the different positions adopted.

Uma Bharati has declared that she is strongly in favour of quotas for women, and has been asking for quotas to the extent of 50 per cent, which is well above what the proposed bill provides for. However, there is a rider. She wants a proportion of the reserved seats to be earmarked specifically for women belonging to the backward communities. Some would also like a certain proportion to be earmarked for women belonging to the religious minorities.

The demand for quotas within the quotas for women has been made by several political leaders, most notably Mulayam Singh Yadav. His argument cannot be dismissed out of hand. He believes that without specified earmarks of the kind he advocates, the seats reserved for women will be monopolized by upper-caste, middle-class women who are better educated and politically more adroit than women from the backward castes and communities. Given the prominence of the ties of family and marriage in our society, the fear is not entirely without basis.

It is hard to understand why those who believe that social disparities cannot be redressed in the general population without caste quotas are unwilling to take caste into account in dealing with the population of women. Are social disparities governed by some special principle in the case of women that is different from the principle by which they are governed in the population as a whole? It is hard to tell from all this how much of the support for women’s reservation is based on a genuine desire to advance the cause of women in public life and how much of it is based merely on political expediency.

The concerned citizen may be forgiven for suspecting a certain lack of good faith in the negotiation and bargaining among political parties over reservations for women. He is bound to ask why political leaders who are so keen to declare their support for a better representation of women have done so little to ensure a more prominent place for them in their own parties. To be sure, there are some women in every political party, but their presence becomes thinner as we move up the organizational hierarchy of the party. All political parties show a palpable bias against women at the top, although some show it more markedly than others.

The case of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is instructive. It is a highly disciplined party and is always in the forefront in the cause of equity and social justice. Not surprisingly, its leaders have been particularly eloquent in the demand for reservations for women in Parliament. At the same time, the party has been adamant in its resistance to the intrusion of women into its highest decision making body, which is the politburo. If the CPI (M) is so keen to see more women in Parliament, why has it not found more room for them in its politburo, or even its central committee? Why does it have to wait for a law to be made by Parliament for promoting a cause, which it claims to be its very own?

From their foundation to present times, communist parties have been zealous in insulating the real seats of power from intrusion by women. For them, it is not the parliament but the party that is the true seat of power. It was Stalin who established the structure of control and command from which women were largely excluded. It is difficult to find a parallel for Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel in any communist party anywhere in the world. In India, women ascend to political office mostly through family and marriage. There are exceptions, such as Mamata Banerjee in the Trinamul Congress and Mayavati in the Bahujan Samaj Party, but none, so far as I am aware, in any of the communist parties in India.

If the CPI(M) — or any other political party — wants to enlarge the role of women in politics, it must, first of all, attend to the bias against women in its own organization. Quotas for women can ensure token representation, but not effective participation. Effective participation by women is difficult to ensure where the bias against them is so deeply entrenched in virtually every political party. It cannot be ensured by simply waving the magic wand of quotas. In the demand for reservations for women, the political parties have found an easy way of evading their responsibility of first creating among women the capabilities necessary for acting as independent and self-reliant political agents.

There was a pervasive bias against women in traditional Indian society. It was reinforced in the classical law of India by the principle of ‘the perpetual tutelage of women’. For generations, women have been socialized in the belief that they cannot take responsibility, and that responsibility for them will be taken by men: the father, the husband, or the son. Wherever women have achieved success through their own initiative and effort in education and employment, that belief has been shaken, but it has been shaken only sporadically and not extensively.

What we need is affirmative action that will help women to act more extensively against the prevalent bias so as to develop their own unrecognized and unutilized potential. Here the political party has an important catalytic role to play. That role is to seek out women with a talent for political work and to nurture and develop that talent from the ground upwards. This is not a task that can be completed in a day or even a decade. It requires patient and unremitting effort from the existing political leadership. Politics, it has been said, “is a slow boring of hard boards”, and nothing shows the truth of that statement better than the effort that will be required if women are to participate effectively and meaningfully in the political process. The leadership of no political party has shown much evidence of its readiness to make the effort.

Equality of opportunity, it has been said, depends not just on the removal of disabilities but also on the creation of abilities. The disabilities imposed upon women for centuries have been eased to some extent, but their abilities have not been given much chance to grow. Wherever, in the school or university, they have been given the chance to grow, women have done as well as men. It has been easier for women to rise to the top in a university or even a bank than in any political party, except where there was a connection by family or marriage. Most political parties, and not just the communist parties, have a poor record in this respect. Their clamour for quotas for women is mainly a way of evading the responsibility to do what needs to be done to enable women to come into their own in the political domain.