Sexism rules, ok!

Don’t sweat the small stuff; it’s the big picture that really matters

When it comes to sexism and misogyny in politics – or indeed in public life – I can’t help but feel that we tend to miss the wood for the trees. We are so busy protesting and outraging against the slings and arrows of everyday political discourse that we completely miss the big-ticket discrimination right under our noses.

Take the recent brouhaha over Vinay Katiyar’s sexist comments about Priyanka Gandhi. Asked what he thought of Priyanka as a star campaigner in the UP Assembly election, Katiyar scoffed that there were much prettier stars campaigning for the BJP. To her credit, Priyanka retorted with good humour: “He’s right, they do!” But then she added for good measure: “If that’s all he sees in my colleagues, who are such strong, brave, beautiful women, who have battled through all sorts of hardships to get where they are, then he makes me laugh even more…”

Priyanka may have laughed it off, but the media were not amused. No sooner were Katiyar’s remarks reported than social media skirmishes began clogging everyone’s timelines as those attacking the BJP leader came up against the full fervor of the Bhakt Brigade. That evening’s prime-time news bulletins devoted hours to debating how awful these sexist remarks were and how Katiyar should be forced to apologise. (True to form, Katiyar refused to do so and even walked out of Nidhi Razdan’s show on NDTV when he ran out of excuses for his behavior.) And the next day’s newspapers headlined the Katiyar remarks, and Priyanka’s retort, asking other women politicians to weigh in on the issue.

All of it left me asking myself some tough questions. Did Vinay Katiyar’s comment offend me? Yes, it did. Should he have objectified both Priyanka and his own party’s women leaders in the way that he did? Of course not. Was it really that big a deal that every TV channel should lead on it? Well, I was not so sure about that one.

Sexist man makes sexist remark. Should we allow that stray remark to dominate the headlines? Or should we go with that old saying: “Dog bites man is not news; man bites dog is.”

Yes, sexism and misogyny are woven into the very fabric of our public life. And it behoves us to call them out whenever we can, as loud as we can, and as often as we can. But should we continually get distracted by the ‘dog bites man’ spectacle and talk of nothing else? Or should we look past these incidents to focus on stuff that really matters?

So, what does matter? Is it that women are constantly being objectified and commodified by male chauvinists? Or is it that women are so rarely seen and heard on our political scene (unless, or course, they are related to male politicians)? Is it that people are too focused on their looks? Or that they are, at the end of the day, virtually invisible?

Let’s take a quick look around. As of this writing, as Uttar Pradesh goes to the polls, of the 324 candidates that the SP has announced so far, only 24 are women (and one of them is Aparna Yadav, Mulayam’s daughter-in-law). The BJP has 36 women among the 304 candidates it has announced. The Congress has announced the names of 43 candidates, of which only two are women. And even the BSP, which has a woman leader in Mayawati, has only 18 women among its 401 candidates.

In Punjab, the number of female candidates in the fray is also abysmal. The Shiromani Akali Dal has five women among its 94 candidates. AAP, which is contesting 112 seats has only nine women candidates. And of the Congress’ 117 candidates, only 11 are women.

The absence of women is, if anything, even more marked in Goa. Here, AAP is fielding five women, the Congress has three female candidates while the BJP has just the one.

Now, here’s an issue that I would like to see debated in prime-time TV news shows. That is the headline that I would like to see in my newspaper. Where are the women? Why are they missing in action? Why do we see so few female faces on the campaign trail?

I really don’t care whether they are pretty or not. Or how Vinay Katiyar – or any other male politician, for that matter – rates their looks. These are minor irritants. Let’s not allow them to distract us from the things that really matter. Men commenting on women’s looks is small stuff; men depriving women of opportunities is what we should be outraged about.

And no, don’t go waving the red rag of the Women’s Reservation Bill at me. You know as well as I do that it will never get passed. But there is nothing preventing political parties from reserving a third of their seats for women off their own bat. So why don’t they put their candidate list where their mouths are, and show us the tickets?

I don’t think this will happen any time soon. But until it does, let’s outrage about it as loud and clear as we can.

Half the sky

Is it really too much to ask for gender parity in Indian politics?

One of the nicest moments in recent politics unfolded in faraway Canada. The newly-elected Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, introduced his new Cabinet to the media, a nice round number of 30, evenly divided into 15 women and 15 men. This led one of the journalists at the press conference to ask, "Why is gender parity so important to you?"

Without missing a beat, Trudeau replied: "Because it is 2015." And then, with a supremely Gallic shrug, he moved on.

It was the matter of factness of Trudeau's response that really appealed to me. It was almost as if he couldn't believe that in the second decade of the 21st century, someone could be asking him such a lame question.

Except, of course, that this not a lame question. And gender parity is not something that any of us can take for granted, no matter where in the world we may live. Forget about the Middle-East or the Third World, where women are often seen as lesser beings, even in the so-called enlightened and progressive West, gender parity is far from a given.

I'll take the example of politics, because that's where we started. The US Senate has 20 women members out of a 100 while the House of Representatives has 84 women members out of 435. So, in the leading democracy of the world, the representation of women stands at an abysmal average of 18 per cent.

In the UK, things are only marginally better. There are 191 women in the House of Commons, whose total strength stands at 650. This brings the representation of women up to 29 per cent, which is an improvement over the previous House, in which women accounted for only 22 per cent.

Germany may have a female Chancellor in Angela Merkel, but the representation of women stops at 37 per cent. Even Scandinavian countries, with their emphasis on gender equality, stop short of gender parity. The representation of women is 40 per cent in Norway and 45 per cent in Sweden.

Canada is alone in the world in having a government that has 50 per cent representation of women in its ranks. (And Canada alone has a Cabinet that looks like Canada itself, with every culture, every ethnic minority represented. But that's another story, for another day.)

So, how does India hold up when put to the gender parity test? Well, as you may have guessed, not very well at all. Out of the 543 members of the Lok Sabha, only 66 are women. But at just above 12 per cent, this is still the highest representation of women in our entire Parliamentary history. (The previous Lok Sabha only had 59 women members.)

And how do individual parties do?

The Trinamool Congress performs the best, with 12 women MPs out of 34, scoring a very respectable 35 percent. The West Bengal state government, though, is a disappointment – despite being led by a female Chief Minister in Mamata Banerjee – with only four women ministers out of a total of 42. But not if you compare it to the Delhi state government, where Arvind Kejriwal didn't see it fit to appoint a single female minister when he swept to power on a virtual landslide.

The ruling BJP may have some strong female leadership in its first string, with Sushma Swaraj serving as external affairs minister, Smriti Irani as Human Resources Development minister, Nirmala Sitharaman as Commerce minister, but its tally of women MPs in the Lok Sabha is far from encouraging: a mere 32 out of 280 members. The only silver lining is that the Speaker of the Lok Sabha remains a woman, with Sumitra Mahajan taking over from Meira Kumar.

The Congress also falls damnably short, even though the party itself is led by a woman, Sonia Gandhi. Of its 44 members in the Lok Sabha only four are women. That really isn't good enough for a party that has always maintained that there should be 33 per cent reservation for women in legislative bodies.

I think I know what all of you are thinking right about now. How can we possibly compare ourselves to European democracies, or even to Canada, when it comes to women’s representation? These countries have progressive societies with strong women's rights movements, while we are struggling to emerge from a feudal mindset, especially in the rural parts of our country.

Fair enough. We have a long way to go before women can even dream of equal representation in politics. But if Canada seems a stretch too far, perhaps we should let the success story of Rwanda be a lesson to us all.

This African nation has a whopping 64 per cent representation of women in its Parliament, the highest in the world. One reason advanced for this is that the male population of this country dropped to 30 per cent after the worst genocide in recent history. But the other explanation is that Rwanda introduced quotas mandating a 30 per cent representation of women in Parliament and government. The women elected under this proviso proved so successful that the gender ratio gradually improved to stand at the current 64 per cent. And soon, it is argued, Rwanda may no longer even need quotas to ensure proportional representation of women.

Surely, if a nation just emerging from a violent past can achieve this, what excuse can we possibly have to fall so short? I have never been a votary of women’s reservation in Parliament, believing that it pushes women into a ghetto, but I am now inclined to say: bring it on!

No reservations

It will only create a political ghetto for women

If all goes according to plan, the Women's Reservation Bill may well be passed by Parliament soon. And more’s the pity.

Yes, that’s right. Call me a contrarian but I don’t agree with the militant sisterhood on this one either. While I am all for increased female participation in the political process, and for more women in Parliament, I really don’t see how reservation is the best way to achieve these goals.

In fact, in my view, the Women Reservation Bill is probably the worst way ever.

Let’s just pause for a moment and see how the Bill would actually work. To achieve 33 per cent reservation for women in Parliament, a proportionate number of constituencies all over the country would be reserved for women on a rolling lottery basis. So, even if a male MP had nurtured his constituency for years on end, if it ended up on the reserved list he would be summarily turfed out to make way for the ladies.

Even if we ignore this how unfair this is to men who may lose out for no fault of theirs, there is a real danger that this measure would actually push women into a kind of sexist space where they could only compete against other women. (Do you believe for a second that many women would be awarded seats in the general category over and above the 33 per cent sanctioned to them? No, I didn’t think so either.)

So, what we would see is a ghettoisation of women in Indian politics, the equivalent of asking the women folk to cram into the ladies compartment while the men took over the rest of the train.

Is this really what we want 60-odd years of Indian parliamentary democracy to come down to: the creation of modern-day zenanas for women, a protected space, where men are kept out by law? Is it really a good idea to introduce another purdah system, no matter how metaphorical, to keep women in their place?

And how exactly does it benefit women to be pushed out of the vast political space they might occupy and sent off to live on the reservation?

All this, to achieve what exactly? To ensure that exactly 33 per cent of Parliament comprises women?

If that is our goal, surely there are easier ways of achieving it than by subverting the essential tenets of our liberal democracy and by amending the Constitution of India. If all political parties are agreed – as they say they are – that women are under-represented in Parliament and that these numbers need to increase then what prevents them from amending their own party constitutions to institute a 33 per cent reservation for women candidates at all levels?

That’s right. Nothing. Every political party could implement this without any trouble at all. And it would be a darn sight easier than bringing through an amendment to the Constitution of India. And yet, no political party – not the Congress, not the BJP, not the Left, not the assorted regional outfits – is even willing to discuss such a commonsensical measure, let alone implement it. Doesn’t it make you wonder about their commitment to female empowerment?

With a certain dreary inevitability, at every election, women candidates are denied seats by political parties across the spectrum, on the pretext of their alleged ‘unwinnability’. And instead of trying to develop a line of more credible female candidates the next time round, all of them fall back on harking for the Women Reservation Bill, which is presented as a panacea for every injustice ever wrought on women.

So is this just a way for the patriarchal political system to tell women in the nicest possible way: “Hey, you couldn’t possibly compete with us boys, so why don’t you go off and play on your own.”

Frankly, it beggars belief that women are falling for this, no actually begging for this to become a reality, especially when I suspect that most of these seats will be reserved for female relatives of powerful male politicians.

Can’t you just see how this will play out? Male politician’s seat comes under the reservation quota. He promptly produces his mother/wife/daughter/daughter-in-law and suggests that the ticket be given to her instead. After all, the family has long ties with the constituency, there is widespread support for his clan in the area, and she can draw on his support base as well. Surely, this makes her the ideal candidate – and at election time, it’s all about ‘winnability’, right?

So across the country, we will see the unedifying spectacle of women from powerful political families entering the system on the basis of this dubious measure. And soon all political power will be concentrated in a few hundred families who control the system on the basis of sheer numbers. The boys will get dynasty. The girls will get reservation.

How can this be anything but disastrous for our parliamentary democracy?

And as for those who insist that it doesn’t matter which women enter the system, because the entry of more women will only benefit the female of the species. I have just two words to say to them: Mayawati; Jayalalitha.

I really don’t think I need say any more.