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SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
PUBLIC EYE
SUNIL KHILNANI
FROM REPRESENTATIVE TO India has long relied on legal and legislative fiat to bring about social reform. In the aftermath of the women’s reservation Bill, we need to ask how electoral reservations fit into the larger picture of our democracy’s evolution
RESERVATION DEMOCRACY? VIJAY JOSHI/PTI
VIPIN KUMAR/HINDUSTAN TIMES
W
e Indians are proud of our democracy, and with reason. Over six decades, we’ve enfranchised hundreds of millions of people who were long excluded from the most basic of civil and social rights. Starting with the 1950 Constitution’s electoral set-asides for the lowest in the social order, extending to reservations for BCs and OBCs in other realms, and coming back to expanded electoral quotas now for women, we’ve used legislation to give a wide range of citizens a real voice in our political democracy. In this respect, we’ve leapfrogged ahead of some of the older, self-satisfied democracies —Germany, for instance—where minority racial groups, the poor, and women are still rarities in public office. But perhaps we too are becoming a little intellectually lazy about our version of democracy. The thought crossed my mind as I considered the impending legislation that will triple the number of women MPs currently in the Lok Sabha to one-third of the available seats, and which will maintain that level by law for at least the next three general elections. There is no doubt we have far too few women in decision-making positions, and this measure offers a swift remedy to that problem. But like most remedies, this one too comes with side effects. While some of those effects have
Victorious: (above) Congress president Sonia Gandhi greets supporters; and women celebrate after the passage of the women’s reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha in March.
received a good deal of attention in the debate over the new legislation, other, more insidious consequences may require more thoughtful attention than we’ve yet paid. Thus far, the loudest objection to the reservation of seats for women has been a caste complaint: that the primary beneficiaries of reservations will likely belong to upper castes. This critical chorus argues that seat quotas for women must come with additional reservations: seats restricted to women of lower castes, seats restricted to Muslim women. This view fully embraces the logic of reservations and quotas, and demands their further extension. The great question, though, is where those extensions stop. If followed to its
logical conclusion, the argument leads to a reductio ad absurdum where virtually every citizen might—on account of some felt disadvantage—demand a “quota” for themselves. A second line of criticism couches its objections in terms of institutional design. This group accepts the utility of quotas, but it disagrees about the mechanisms chosen to give women greater representation. They argue cogently that the Bill’s adopted means—reserved constituencies, which are rotated every election—weaken both accountability and political parties. Indeed, with constituency rotation, elected candidates will represent their constituencies for just one term—so nullifying the only real form of sanction that electors
have over whom they elect: to reject them when they stand again. Since two-thirds of all constituencies at each election would be such movable feasts, the attempt by such means to remedy a representational deficit will in fact create a massive accountability deficit. Instead of slapping a “Women Only” sign for candidates in certain constituencies at election time, such critics argue, we should require political parties to field a specified number of women candidates—but leave it to them to allocate constituency tickets. The third line of objection is the line I find probes most deeply into the heart of the problem. It’s more philosophical than political, and it also happens to be the core reason our founders rejected separate electorates: because such electorates are premised on the idea that only like can represent like. In this view, conceding the principle of quotas and reservations in the electoral process, in whatever form, serves ultimately to entrench identities, and fragments efforts to build a community of individual citizens. While the principle serves expedient purposes,
long-term it undermines both unity and individuality. For better or worse, India has long relied on legal and legislative fiat, rather than politics and economics, to bring about social reform. But as we weigh the great positive gains of having more women leaders against the problematic ways in which we hope to accomplish this, it’s useful to step back from the current debate over legislation, to ask how electoral reservations fit into the larger picture of our democracy’s evolution. Currently, 131 parliamentary seats are already reserved, for candidates from the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. If one then adds the 137 general seats to be reserved for women, at the next general election, in just under half of all Lok Sabha seats (268 to be precise) the social and gender identities of candidates will be predetermined by law. The result will, I suspect, be a profound change not just in the texture of Indian democracy, but in its meaning. That democracy was founded on an idea of political representation that went something like this. Given India’s vast scale, and its manifold forms of social life, the only way to give it a unified, legitimate modern state was to enable competition for state office among political parties that appealed across social identities. Parties would have to win support and create allegiances based on political ideals and values, rather than on massaging social commonalities of religion, caste and region. To that end, the colonial-era electorates that separated Indians along religious or caste lines were abolished. Instead, political parties were required to compete within a single electoral arena, divided into territorial constituencies that contained randomly grouped citizens. Success in these conditions required parties to offer political visions that appealed to a range of different social profiles. It required building social and political coalitions. Yet now, as we install an order that we imagine mirrors our society, we are replacing the idea of political representation with that of social reflection. Motivating this shift is an implicit belief that an order which more directly mirrors society as it is will be more legitimate than one that attempts to articulate a vision of what it could be. I wonder, though, if we are being clear-headed about what sort of democracy we are building. Democracy, wherever it has appeared, has been an answer to a particular local problem. As it emerged in England and America, it was an attempt to restrain the power of the crown or of a federal executive, and as such it tried to reconcile a