Women press for more parliamentary seats
NEW DELHI, (AFP) – Indian women legislators, jettisoning their political loyalities, last Friday ganged up on the eve of International Women’s Day to revive a bill reserving them a third of parliamentary seats.
Male MPs have been blocking their spirited drive and Friday even Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj expressed her doubts on the fate of the bill, first tabled in the federal house in 1996.
The government plans to bring the Women’s Reservation Bill in the current session, but it is unclear whether the long-pending measure will be brought in its original or diluted form she said.
Swaraj, a firebrand MP, said an all-party meeting called by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee for an absolute political consensus on the thorny bill failed following 90 minutes of discussions.
Vajpayee, a bachelor who stoutly supports the draft law, bluntly told the detractors Friday that his ruling BJP party will use its brute majority to legislate the bill if the deadlock did not end, other officials said.
The national house, meanwhile, reverberated with demands of female MPs who cajoled their male counterparts to shed fears and worries and block a third of the lower house’s 545 seats for women by drafting the bill into law.
Female MPs belonging to bitterly-divided political parties joined hands during a heated debate and accused male MPs.
Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, too, took up the cudgels on behalf of female colleagues, who are vastly outnumbered in parliament.
In parliament’s upper house, meanwhile, women members joined the deputy chairwoman of the nominated house, Najma Heptulla, to press for their long-standing demand.
Heptullah opened the debate saying she first sought the “protection” of her boss Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and urged him to use his influence as India’s vice president to push through with the bill.
Injustice is being done to the women of the country because the government has been dragging its feet on the issue since 1996, chanted the women MPs.
The proposed bill would block 33 percent of seats in national and state assemblies for women.
Numbering about 45 in the lower house, women have failed to press ahead with their orchestrated campaign in the face of total male opposition.
Although India had one of the world’s first female prime ministers in Indira Gandhi — a contemporary of Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher — the number of women in parliament actually shrunk in the 1999 general elections from 49 to 43.
Of the 4,800 candidates who stood in the national elections, only 293 were women.
