Delimitation With a Dose of Patriarchy: The Final Act in Modi’s Plan to Hold On to Power Come What May |
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Hidden behind the Modi government’s plans to expand the size of the Lok Sabha from its current strength of 543 seats to as many as 850, and link the reservation of a third of all parliamentary seats for women to this expanded house is a sinister political objective: to reconfigure the relative distribution of seats between states based purely on demography, a change that it hopes will make it easier for the Bharatiya Janata Party to win a majority in the 2029 Lok Sabha elections.
Being regressive men, there is also a patriarchal objective that Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have in mind: diluting the potentially revolutionary essence of reserving seats for women.
Women’s reservation has always been as much about giving women a voice as about compelling powerful men to vacate political spaces they have illegitimately come to occupy through centuries of gender-based discrimination. By linking the reservation of seats for women to a huge and gratuitous expansion in the strength of the Lok Sabha and legislative assemblies, the Modi government is acting in the service of the patriarchy. Giving 1/3 seats to women in a 543 seat house where men today have 86% of the seats means forcing parties to redistribute power away from powerful men towards women. Instead, Modi wants to ensure that the bahubalis with enviable assets and unenviable criminal records not only get to stay in the house, but worse, that more of their brethren will get to join them. This is not what ceding space to women is supposed to look like. This is managing the discomfort of powerful men at the entry of women in unprecedented numbers, something akin to attempts by caste Hindus to ensure control of ‘their’ temples even after they were forced to allow Dalits in.
In essence, Modi is proposing to provide a zenana wing to an expanded haveli, where there will be even more men in absolute terms than there were before. Of course, women will be one-third of the membership but it is well known that men tend to occupy more physical and aural space, especially in Indian legislatures. So the effect of having 284 women amongst 566 men will be quite different from having 181 women amongst 362 men. If one considers the clubby, khap-like instincts of many male MPs, one can easily see how the larger house becomes a more formidable space for women MPs to negotiate their way around – individually and as a bloc – than the more intimately sized........