What do elections mean for women?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, November 22, 2015

PTI

 

 

They were everywhere. Women in colourful saris, smiling broadly, proudly displaying their voter IDs, standing in line to cast their vote. Once the dust settles on Bihar 2015, these images of Bihari women will linger.

But there are many questions. What was behind those smiles? Were they proud to be voters? Were they pleased that the act of voting made them visible? Had they really decided independently on their choice of candidate? Why do elections appear to mean so much to some women who appear otherwise to be virtually invisible to politicians, media, and society?

Many in the media concluded that the high turnout of women voters contributed to the victory of the Grand Alliance in Bihar. The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) was more cautious after its post-poll survey, saying there was no clear correlation between the women’s vote and the Grand Alliance’s dramatic victory. In any case, how can we know for certain how many women voted for which party?

What the CSDS survey did conclude was that it was younger women and poor women who were most enthusiastic about voting. And they voted mostly for the Grand Alliance. More than that, by turning out as they did in large numbers on polling day, they reminded us yet again that despite all its problems, democracy is alive and breathing in this country.

How did this happen, this engagement by women in a process from which they had largely been excluded? Politics in most parts of India had been a male game. Of course, there were women but they found their space by virtue of their association with a powerful man and rarely on their own terms.

The change began with the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution in 1992 that devolved power to local governments. It allowed for an increasing number of women to contest for seats in local bodies because one-third was reserved for them. In Bihar, it was Nitish Kumar, now once again the Chief Minister, who set off a trend by increasing reservation for women from one-third to half in 2006.

Even if we presume that half the women who stood for elections and won seats in panchayats and nagar palikas did so as proxies of their husbands, that still leaves a substantial number of women who knew what they were doing. What is also interesting is to see how those who initially accepted being proxies gradually began asserting their own agency. In fact, it was in Bihar that I saw this when I spent time with a woman mukhiya of a panchayat in Nawada district. Unlettered, a widow, and completely new to politics, within one term this woman had grasped the essence of what was expected of her. After her first term, she won again from a general seat.

The sad part of this story is that while women are voting and participating in panchayats and urban local bodies, their numbers are still miserably low in State Assemblies and in Parliament. That is evident in the results of the 2015 Bihar elections. According to data on the Election Commission’s website, only 25 women were elected out of 243 elected representatives. Of these, just under half, or 12 women, are from Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal. Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) had only five.

Perhaps one should not read too much into this. It is interesting, however, that while interviews with women during the election campaign suggested that the majority of them rated Nitish Kumar’s rule much higher because he was perceived to have enhanced safety for women, the RJD appears to have done better in choosing women candidates who could win.

Win or lose, the essential point of reservation, or encouraging more women to enter the political fray, is to accept that women have an equal right to participate in governance. If the scales are weighed against women’s participation because society lays down that they remain at home, there has to be active intervention to encourage them. That is why we need reservation. But just greater numbers of women in elected office will have little meaning unless the process of participation accommodates men and women as equal partners.

This is what a photograph of the new Cabinet of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which went viral on social media, demonstrates. It underlines that it is feasible and completely normal to have a Cabinet with an equal number of men and women. When asked by a reporter to explain, Trudeau replied, “Because it is 2015!” Exactly. That is something we need to hear here. Working with women as equals is not a favour that men bestow on women. It is how the world should work. It is how the world can work.

Wisdom beyond schooling

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Jan 18, 2015

Veena Devi is unlettered. I use that word rather than ‘uneducated’. When I met her more than five years ago, she was the mukhiya, or sarpanch, of Loharpura panchayat in Nawada district in south Bihar. She is now in her early forties. At a time when the government had reserved half the seats in panchayats for women, Veena Devi had been elected twice from general seats.

In her first term in the panchayat, she admitted that she felt lost. She did not understand fully what was going on. One could hardly blame her for this. Married at 13 to a man much older than herself, a widower with two children, she became a mother at 15 and a widow at 17. Veena had seen more than her share of life and its sorrows even before she became a major. Going to school was nowhere on the horizon.

Yet, perhaps because she was compelled to learn in the ‘school of life’, she had a wisdom beyond her years and certainly more profound than anything taught in our schools. Without being tutored, she had a sense of what people needed, how to order priorities in terms of the use of developmental funds, and how to listen to the people who came to her with problems.

I thought of Veena Devi when I learned that the Rajasthan Government had passed an ordinance stipulating that only those who have cleared Std. VIII or X can contest panchayat or zilla parishad elections in that state. If such a law had existed in Bihar, a woman like Veena Devi would never have had a chance to contest.

The assumption behind this ordinance, promulgated without any justification of its urgency, is that because panchayats have to handle considerable developmental funds, ‘educated’ people will be more efficient and less corrupt. The assumption defies not just logic but evidence that shows that corruption certainly has no connection with levels of education. Make a list of the most corrupt people in India and the majority would be so-called ‘literate’.

My own experience of meeting women like Veena Devi has been humbling. How easily those of us with privilege and access to education think we are wiser. And yet the clarity of these women shouldering the responsibility of managing developmental funds for a panchayat remind us that reading numbers and letters, going to school or college in itself does not make you a wiser person or a better administrator. It does not automatically imbue you with a concern for other people. It does not necessarily teach you how to listen to people, how to empathise, how to understand what people are trying to tell you.

None of this means that we must not ensure that every child does go to school; that by the time she is ready to contest an election she does possess basic literacy skills. But let us not, while we wait for that to happen, cut off from our systems of governance women like Veena Devi.

The best part of the 73rd amendment that laid the grounds for elections to panchayats and reservation for women is that it has brought into governance systems over 1.5 million women, many of them poor, from the lower castes, and also often with very little schooling. And although one should not generalise, and there are many instances of such women being used by men as proxies, there are an increasing number now who understand the system and who are able to work it so that it serves the interests of the largest number of people.

Let me return to Veena Devi to illustrate what I mean. Despite the handicap of minimal education, she quickly worked out how to overcome it. For instance, when she was handed petitions, she would ask people to give her some time to get back to them. She would then get a trusted person to read and tell her the content of the petition and come to a decision.

She also had the benefit of some sympathetic higher officials, including a woman bureaucrat, and a non-governmental organisation that invested in training her and giving her sound advice. As a result, when she had to decide about the use of funds for one of the villages, she chose a scheme of installing solar lights in the public areas of the village, knowing that this would benefit women in particular. In return, people of that village expressed satisfaction with her leadership.

For every Veena Devi, there are literally thousands of other women who are providing decent governance inputs at the panchayat level. They are largely unseen; they do face problems; they could benefit from more training and from getting literacy skills. But their main qualification is their commitment and their desire to serve their community. These women do not deserve to be left out of the picture because some misguided people in Rajasthan have decided that schooling equals wisdom and honesty.

A different politics

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, October 4, 2009

THE OTHER HALF

KALPANA SHARMA

Women in Kavthepiran, a village in western Maharashtra, show how it is possible for ordinary people to have a stake in electoral politics and transform public life.

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Sanghi and Kavthepiran are two sides of the same coin....

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Photo: D.B. Patil

Mandate for change: Women representatives at a zilla panchayat meeting in Belgaum.

Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana are just around the corner. In Maharashtra, the scene is even more confused than it was during the General Elections. The only thing people can state with certainty is that it will be a fractured mandate. And that dynastic politics is a bug that has bitten all political parties, not just the Congress. So the sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law of a range of politicians of different hues are contesting these elections. Yet, what they have to promise is neither new nor, it would seem, interesting for the aam admi or aurat. In fact, the one fact that comes through in the media reports where journalists have spoken to ordinary people is the increasing disillusionment with politicians and with politics.

In the midst of this rather bleak scenario, reports of a different kind of politics come as a breath of fresh air, and also provide a sliver of hope that another way is possible. In September, communal riots broke out in some villages and towns of Sangli district in Maharashtra’s sugar belt. As usually happens with this kind of news, there is a flurry of stories. And then, when peace returns, there is no further news. But from the initial spate of stories, the name of one village stood out — Kavthepiran.

Not your typical village

In some ways, Kavthepiran is just another typical village in western Maharashtra with a population of around 15,000 people. But it is exceptional for a variety of reasons.

This difference is what made the story of Kavthepiran so interesting. The village came into the news because the communal incidents, sparked by a provocative video circulating through the Internet and the depiction of the fight between Shivaji and Afzal Khan on a Ganesh pandal, led to a mosque in the village being damaged. The hundred-odd Muslim families who had lived for generations in the village took fright and wanted to leave.

The women of Kavthepiran intervened and prevented such an exodus from taking place. The 17-member Panchayat in the village consists entirely of women. They decided not just to repair the mosque but also to personally approach the Muslim families and assure them that they would be looked after. Since then Kavthepiran has disappeared from the news. Good news and peace are not really news.

Possibility of change

But the story of the transformation of this village needs to be told again because it is an example of what is possible even within existing systems of electoral politics. Until 2000, Kavthepiran had nothing to distinguish itself from other villages. Its claim to fame was excessive alcoholism, crime and filth. One man, Bhimrao Mane, ruled the village with his acolytes. No one else could have a say.

In 2001, Bhimrao went through something of a change of heart. On October 2, he called a meeting of the village, a Gram Sabha. Kavthepiran’s women used the occasion to express their disgust with the state of affairs and threatened to migrate from the village en masse. Bhimrao listened and publicly promised to personally give up alcohol and to ensure that it was not sold in the village. Taking the cue from him, the village women went around and destroyed all the liquor shops and stills in the village. Their campaign did not end there. If anyone was caught drunk in the village, his head was shaved and he was paraded on a donkey. Not exactly a democratic way of functioning but perhaps they felt that public shaming was the only effective way of curbing alcoholism.

In the elections that followed, women got elected to the Panchayat. With enthusiasm, they went about cleaning the village and successfully won the State Government’s Sant Gadebaba Abhiyan award for the cleanest village. Three years later, in 2006, they won the Nirmal Gram village award from the Central Government for having completely stopped open defecation. The majority of the houses in the village now have private toilets and public toilets have been built for those who cannot afford to build their own.

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