Sigmund Freud died without answering it. Hollywood tried to answer it with a sexist fantasy in 2000 about an MCP of a Chicago advertising executive suddenly gaining an ESP skill to read female minds. Just like the infamous Peeping Tom of Coventry who spied on Lady Godiva riding naked, he eavesdrops into a colleague’s mind to find out What Women Want, and steals her ideas for selling women’s goods. Cheap!
Our netas don’t have to eavesdrop into eves’ minds. They claim to know what women want—not just free fridges, TV sets, bicycles, bus rides, monthly doles and schools for kids, but also a third of the seats in the law-making bodies. MPs a generation or two ago would have said, Cheek! Rouged cheek!
Indeed, they did. The idea was resisted, even by the most gallant of maidens’ men in Parliament, right from the time when Gita Mukherjee, Margaret Alva et al asked for it in the 1990s. Many a hair-raising debate was done over it since a blunt-talking Sharad Yadav trashed the idea as a fad of the ‘bob-cut class’, and a frail Hamid Ansari expended all his house-keeping energy in 2010 to get an orderly debate in the Rajya Sabha and get a Manmohan Singh government bill passed. Then, in 2023, Narendra Modi, as is his wont, got a constitutional change in Hindi, called it Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, linked the seat quota issue to the next post-census delimitation, and got an enabling law passed by both houses.
Women MPs of the BJP protest after the bill to implement reservation for women in legislatures was defeated | PTI
All remained well with the amrit-kaaled gods in the political heavens, and there was shanti on the toxic earth of unwashed millions. Only the southern netas, who had cut their population growth and spent funds on schools and hospitals, kept their fingers crossed, worried the northern multitudes would crowd them out of the Lok Sabha if the seats got apportioned on headcount basis.
Then the Centre got a bright idea. Why wait for the headcount? Why not offer half more seats to every state, mark a third of the total for women and get the needed laws made in two days?
Fair and square, isn’t it? But the opposition thought it a rummy affair. The numbers weren’t getting writ into the law, but were being offered as an assurance by the home minister. Soon their number nerds found the northern states would gain around 200 more seats collectively, while the south and east states might gain 66-90. Such a distribution, feared the Congress and regional parties who rule the south and east, would skew law-making into a privilege of the north. The opposition saw red, got their act together and showed the red card to the government.
Now, what tax-paying mortals would like to know are: with about three million elected men and women strutting around from panchayats to the presidential house enjoying pay, perks and pensions, do we need more or fewer netas? Two, if 543 men and women can’t get our voices heard in the house, how can 850 make us heard? The more the merrier? The more can be medley and bedlam, too.
Three, as for women being given their share, isn’t there an easier way out? Make a law right now to reserve a third of the current 543 seats for women, and keep our better halves happy. Hold the headcount by all means, but put off the delimitation for another 25 years.
Sounds fair and square to us, and to most of those in the fair sex. But therein lies the catch. For all the gallantry that’s claimed by all sides, few of these men would give up the seats that they have been holding. If women want assured seats, let them come with their own chairs, they think.
Take it from me, ladies and maidens, you’re on your own!