THE passage of the women’s reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha has a number of plus pints. For one, it puts to rest the lingering suspicion that the leadership of the ruling party belongs outside the fauna grouping, Phylum Chordata, Sub-phylum Vertebrata. For another, the lot of Indian women might actually improve. The biggest plus point is that the system shows some sign of being capable of pushing through the most important reform we need, political reform.
   Much of the Bill’s criticism is specious. One complaint is that upper caste women would hog most of the seats, lowering further the legislative presence of backward castes and Muslims — the basis for the demand for quotas within the women’s quota. Take a constituency that favours a backward caste or Muslim candidate. Would the gender of the legislator change any of the factors that stack the odds against an upper caste candidate? Such a possibility would arise only if the social prejudice against their own women entering the public sphere is stronger among backward castes/Muslims than the desire to elect one of their own or to defeat an upper caste representative. Concretely, in a constituency where Muslims could tilt the result against a Vishwa Hindu Parishad activist by voting for a Muslim woman candidate, would they hold back on the ground that they would be encouraging unorthodox permissiveness among their women? This is entirely unlikely. Only the Taliban and reactionary clergy would endorse such a course. Let’s not forget that Muslims of the subcontinent have generally voted for liberal leaders, not those who posit piety as their first virtue, leave alone fundamentalists. Whether Jinnah, Bhutto or Mujib, popular Muslim leaders of the subcontinent have been nonreligious leaders of the community.
   Another objection is that reserving seats for women is futile as they would just be proxies for male leaders who temporarily have to vacate their seats because they’ve been reserved for women. This would be true, to a large extent. But then, are those who raise this objection also saying that all Congress MPs voted in favour of the Women’s Bill because their conscience told them to, and not because of a party whip? Parties decide, not individual representatives, for the most part. Then again, the experience of reserving, in panchayats, one-third of all seats for women shows that once elected, many women discover their own voice, acquire new agency and transform into community leaders. The process is likely to continue at the higher tiers of government .
   The proxy-for-men argument actually contradicts another objection raised in the same breath: this system of rotating constituencies prevents leaders from nurturing their constituencies. True enough, reserving one-third the seats for women, in combination with the provision that the same constituency would not be reserved for two consecutive terms, does mean that twothirds of the constituencies would not see the same person representing them for two successive terms, unless, of course, a woman MP’s record has been so successful as to make her party field her for a second term as its candidate from a general, unreserved seat. This lack of continuity could disincentivise a leader to nurture a particular constituency. But not if a woman MP were just a proxy for her powerful male relative. Through her, the male leader would continue to nurture the constituency.
   BUT then, is it an MP’s job to nurture his constituency? A citizen’s welfare is the combined result of the policies and actions of the three levels of government: local, state and Centre. A legislator’s job is to exercise his constituents’ right to shape policy at his level and hold the government to account. For an MP to busy himself with roads in his constituency is to abdicate responsibility to shape the Centre’s conduct on say, delayed defence procurement or limiting the liability arising from nuclear accidents . But the first-past-the-post system that India follows nurtures the travesty that an MP’s job is, indeed, to engage in local area development. So much so that we have even assigned MPs their own LAD funds.This must change, not be preserved at all costs.
   The popular response to the earlier stand on Mumbai’s Indianness and the present one on the women’s bill should convince the poltical leadership that boldness pays. People elect leaders not to reign or wilt under pressure, but to run the country. If that entails taking controversial decisions, please take them in the country’s interest, and the people will stand by you.
   The leadership should take the momentum forward and push the envelope further on political reform. We need reform of political funding, abandoning the present methods of looting the exchequer, sale of patronage and extortion from the public. These methods suborn the bureaucracy as well, destroy the nation’s moral fibre, make nonsense of corporate governance and make India one of the worst places in which to do business.
   A more fundamental reform would be to move towards proportional representation, abandoning the present first-past-the-post system. Parties would have seats in proportion to the votes they secure. Instead of individual politicians nurturing constituencies, parties would have to focus more on delivering governance and differentiating themselves from other parties on policy. The biggest gain would be to make coalitions the rule rather than the exception. This would eschew extremist politics, produce more active and continuous engagement with the electorate and not just with the elected representatives and put pressure on political parties to turn internally more democratic. Implementing women’s reservation would be far simpler as well.
   Much of Europe already follows variants of the system. Even Britain, whose electoral system India imported after gaining independence from it, has adopted a form of proportional representation for elections to the legislatures of Scotland and Wales.
   Political fortune favours the bold and spurns the timid and the indecisive.