Women's reservation bill-Feedback on NDTV debate

Feedback: For once it was good to see the real fire power behind the women's reservations bill. There was a substantial amount of Nari Shakti on that panel yesterday. My sympathies with Mr Yadav and with Vikram. But I must say the two gentelmen conducted themselves well by not losing their cool. I think Vikram's efforts, particularly, were commendable. He did well to inject humour when needed to cool frayed tempers and bring the discussion back on track. On a more serious note though, I got the impression that the supporters of the bill have an air of desparation about them to get the bill through without thinking through what is really needed to ensure that it achieves its primary objective: that of empowering women. Miss Lamba and the BJP representative (organizers should ensure names of panelists are displayed on the lectern) certainly appeared to typify that desparation in their refusal to even consider alternatives suggestions. As Prod Madhu pointed out, I think the 33% reservation for party tickets would have been a sound first step in this direction. As she noted no political party would want to risk one-third of its seats so the fears expressed by the critics of this suggestion seem quite unfounded to me. In my view the other suggestion i.e to increase the number of parliamentary seats should not even be considered. It is not as if we are short of legislators to run our deomicratic institutions. Far from it. The suggestion appears to portray our legisltative institutions as a mere equal opportunities employer rather than as temples of democracy which is what they are meant to be. My my main concern is that the ongoing debate does not consider some of the other, perhaps more critical, enabling factors that are prerequisites for women's political empowerment. To me it smacks of an easy-to -implement quick fix effort to achieve an objective that will in reality take a lot more sustained effort to achieve. A sttrong long term focus upgrading the knowledge and skills of our legislators is needed. Such efforts and, more importantly, the thought process to implement them, are in short supply. In this context I am reminded of a recent news report about a delegation of Ministers of State who had to approach the PM becuase they were not being alloted any kind of work by their senior ministers. The continuing high absenteeism amongs MPs during important debates is another indicator that the key enabling infrastructure for upgrading the skills needed for legislative and governance roles is missing. Among the current lot of parliamentarians only a small select group of people seem to have the required level of confidence and skills for this job. For most parliamentarians their debating and reasoning skills appear to be good enough to allow them to score political brownie points against each other in very superficial debates. For most these skills are not backed up by an in-depth knowledge of how political and governance institutions are meant to work. In this environemnt if we introducing new members with perhaps even fewer skills and lesser experience, I think it is not conducive to the growth of parliamentary democracy. Consider Miss Lamba, for example. Despite her 16 years of political experience did not inspire confidence yesterday that she is ready for the role of a Parliamentarian. He arguments yesterday simply did not have the substance to inspire such confidence. While Mrs Suhasini Ali at the other end was certainly doing a much more impressive job of it. We already have enough people in our legislatures who can make a lot of noise. We need people who can contribute to a constructive on issues that concern a vast and complex country. Pakistani democracy is another example of this failing: women representatives in percentage terms far outnumber those in India and yet barring a few exceptions the quality of political debate in Pakistan remains very poor. At the other end of the spectrum there are countries like UK where despite no reservations women parliamentarians contribute very effectively to political debate. This obviously has as much to do with their primary and higher education system as with their efforts to continuously update and upgrade the skills and knowledge of their MP's about key issues before they are put in positions of responsibility. In our country by introducing this bill at this stage I think we are making the mistake of putting the cart before the horse. Without putting in place the infrastructure needed for ensuring / upgrading the skills of our parliamentarians if we go ahead and reserve seats for them in the parliament we only set the stage for more political corruption. It is no secret that when people without the necassary skills and capability are put in positions of responsibility they often resort to questionable practices to ensure they a secure future for themselves. And these are not ordinary positions we are talking about. These are some of the most politically empowered positions in the country. I hope when this Bill is introduced in the Lok Sabha for debate some of these issues I have written about are considered for further debate. ...more