Nidhi Razdan: Challenges mount for India's Women's Reservation Bill

Gulf News

It was a significant moment in India’s Parliament this week when Parliament passed the long-awaited Women’s Reservation Bill, which reserves 33 per cent of seats in Parliament and state legislatures for women. It has been a long journey for this legislation, first proposed in the mid-1990s when I was a college student at Delhi University.  Read the full story here: https://gulfnews.com/opinion/op-eds/indias-womens-reservation-bill-faces-more-hurdles-1.98259045  See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos Read more Gulf News stories here: https://bit.ly/2HLJ2km  Subscribe to Gulf News on YouTube and watch more of our videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/GulfNewsTV  #UAEnews #India #politics

Transcript

00:00And so the special parliament session that everyone was waiting with bated breath for

00:09ultimately turned out to be about a historic piece of legislation, the Women's Reservation

00:14Bill. This is a bill that will essentially reserve 33% of seats for women members of

00:20parliament and women legislators in state assemblies. But the devil is in the detail.

00:27So while it is a historic piece of legislation and something that had been hanging fire since

00:31the mid 1990s, when I was in college, the fact is that it's not something that's going

00:37to be implemented right away. Because the bill very clearly says that first there has

00:42to be a census, and then the delimitation process that has to take place across the

00:47country. And then the seats will be reserved for 33% of women. Now this has created controversy

00:54for a couple of reasons. The opposition has pointed out that when the BJP had supported

00:59the Women's Bill in its earlier avatar back in 2010, when the UPA government was in power,

01:04at that time, it had not been linked to the census and to delimitation. And so why was

01:08that really being done now? The second is that the Congress has shifted its position

01:14on the bill by demanding reservations for other backward caste women and caste and scheduled

01:19tribe women, a quota within a quota. That was something that actually led to the bill's

01:25downfall in the Lok Sabha back in 2010. It was passed by the Rajya Sabha at the time.

01:30But because of this demand for a sub quota by the Yadav trio of Sharad Yadav, Mulamsi

01:36Yadav and Lalu Yadav, the bill fell through. Now the Congress has changed its position.

01:41And that has to do with the political mathematics ahead of next year's Lok Sabha polls. It's

01:46clear that the Modi government decided to do it in this sort of dramatic way with a

01:51special session at this time, simply because it is eyeing women voters in a big way ahead

01:57of assembly polls later this year and the Lok Sabha polls next year. At the end of the

02:01day, the actual implementation of this bill is something that is likely to take several years.

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