‘This complete guide to women’s presence and performance in India’s Parliament is a must read for anyone interested in gender and politics. Fascinating stories and critical analysis illuminate the multiple challenges women face in every dimension of their parliamentary politics/life.’
Niraja Gopal Jayal, Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
‘India—the most populous democracy in the world—has just 64 women in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament), ranking 149th worldwide in this regard. Why? This terrific new study by Shirin M. Rai and Carole Spary provides fresh insights into issues of representation and representativeness, gender and power, and the role of women in parliament—both within India and more broadly. Drawing upon qualitative and quantitative evidence, this book provides an essential contribution towards the literature on women in politics.’
Pippa Norris, Professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, US
Performing Representation
Women Members in the Indian Parliament
Shirin M. Rai
Carole Spary
1
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ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-948905-3
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Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament
Shirin M. Rai and Carole Spary
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780199489053
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489053.001.0001
(p.ii) Endorsement
Shirin M. Rai Carole Spary
‘This complete guide to women’s presence and performance in India’s Parliament is a must read for anyone interested in gender and politics. Fascinating stories and critical analysis illuminate the multiple challenges women face in every dimension of their parliamentary politics/life.’
Niraja Gopal Jayal, Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
‘India—the most populous democracy in the world—has just 64 women in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament), ranking 149th worldwide in this regard. Why? This terrific new study by Shirin M. Rai and Carole Spary provides fresh insights into issues of representation and representativeness, gender and power, and the role of women in parliament—both within India and more broadly. Drawing upon qualitative and quantitative evidence, this book provides an essential contribution towards the literature on women in politics.’
Pippa Norris, Professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, US
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Tables and Figures
Tables
I.1 Turnout in Lok Sabha Elections: 1952–2004 2
I.2 Politics and Performance Framework 21
3.1 Success Rates of Candidates Contesting Seats in Lok Sabha Elections (1980–2014), by Selected Party Categories and Combined 89
3.2 Ratio of State to National Party Candidates in Lok Sabha Elections, by Sex 96
3.3 Sole-Woman and Multi-Women Candidate Contests in Three Lok Sabha Elections (2004–14) 100
4.1 Presence of SC-Reserved Women MPs in 15th Lok Sabha, by Party 128
4.2 Lok Sabha Women MPs from North East since Independence 134
4.3 Educational Qualifications of Lok Sabha MPs from 7th–12th and 14th–16th Lok Sabhas (Percentage of Total MPs) 135
4.4 Self-Identified Occupational Backgrounds of Lok Sabha MPs from the 7th to 16th Lok Sabhas (Percentage) 137
4.5 Women MPs Who Have Served Five or More Terms in the Lok Sabha 145
4.6 Women MPs Who Have Served Four or More Terms in the Rajya Sabha 146
4.7 Top 10 Current Women MPs Based on the Number of Twitter Followers 160
4A.1 Proportion of MPs across General and Reserved Seats in the 10th to 16th Lok Sabhas 167
5.1 Gender-Disaggregated Analysis of MP Participation in the14th Lok Sabha 173
5.2 Gender-Disaggregated Analysis of MP Participation in the 15th Lok Sabha 174
5.3 Top 10 Women MPs by Participation in Debates (14th Lok Sabha) 175
5.4 Top 10 Women MPs by Participation in Debates (15th Lok Sabha) 176
5.5 Top 10 Women MPs by Number of Questions Asked (14th Lok Sabha) 177
5.6 Participation of Women and Men in Selected Parliamentary Debates 190
6.1 Timetable of Events in the CEW’s Establishment 216
6.2 Presence of Women MPs on Financial Committees and Selected DRSCs, 13th–16th Lok Sabhas 220
6.3 Matters Considered by the CEW (13th–15th Lok Sabhas) 226
6.4 Summary of ‘Analysis of Action Taken by Government’ by the CEW 232
7.1 List of Elected Representatives Disqualified after Conviction by a Court of Law 248
7.2 Women MPs: Criminal Records and Financial Assets 250
7.3 Top 10 Highest Spending States and Union Territories (2015–16) 262
7.4 Lowest Spending States and Union Territories (2015–16) 263
7.5 MPLADS Individual High Spenders (2015–16) 265
9.1 Women Incumbents Re-contesting and Re-elected: 14th to 15th Lok Sabha (2009) and 15th to 16th Lok Sabha (2014) 308
and Figures
Figures
I.1 Parliament House, Taken from Raisina Road 3
I.2 Women as a Percentage of Rajya Sabha MPs (1952–2016) 10
1.1 India Gate, New Delhi 32
1.2 Bharatmata by Abanindranath Tagore 39
1.3 Outer Corridor, Indian Parliament 45
1.4 The Ladies’ Room in Lok Sabha 53
2.1 Women’s Groups Campaigning for the WRB, Delhi, December 2013 76
3.1a Women in Lok Sabha Elections 1957–2014 82
3.1b Women in Lok Sabha Elections 1957–2014 83
3.2 Women Candidates in Lok Sabha Elections as a Percentage of Total Candidates, by Party (INC and BJP), 1980–2014 93
3.3 Nomination of Women Candidates (Percentage of Total Party Candidates) by Selected Parties in Lok Sabha Elections since 1980 94 and 95
3.4 A TMC Candidate Campaigning in South Delhi in 2014 (top) and the Candidate’s Election Leaflet (bottom) 113
3.5 Election Campaign Resources and Publicity for a BJP Candidate in South Delhi in 2014 114
3.6 AAP Candidate Campaigning in Mumbai, 2014 115
3.7 Forecasting Growth of Women MPs in the Lok Sabha in the Absence of Quotas 120
4.1 Proportion of MPs Elected from SC-Reserved Lok Sabha Constituencies, 10th–16th Lok Sabha 126
4.2 Proportion of MPs Elected from ST-Reserved Lok Sabha Constituencies, 10th–16th Lok Sabha 129
4.3 Marital Status of Women and Men MPs in the 15th and 16th Lok Sabhas 139
4.4 Number of Children among Men and Women MPs in the 15th and 16th Lok Sabhas 140
4.5 Age Distribution of Men and Women MPs at the Start of the 15th Lok Sabha (2009) 141
Tables and Figures
4.6 Age Distribution of Men and Women MPs at the Start of the 16th Lok Sabha (2014) 141
5.1 Box Plots Showing Participation in Debates of 14th Lok Sabha by ‘Gender’ 172
5.2 Box Plot of Gender and Debates in the 15th Lok Sabha 173
6.1 Composition of Members of the CEW, 13th to 16th Lok Sabhas 215
Abbreviations
AAP Aam Aadmi Party
ADR Association for Democratic Reforms
AIADMK All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
AIDWA All India Democratic Women’s Association
AIIMS All India Institute of Medical Sciences
AIMIM All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen
AIWC All India Women’s Conference
ASHA accredited social health activist
BJD Biju Janata Dal
BJP Bharatiya Janata Party
BPSF Bengal Provincial Students Federation
BPST Bureau of Parliamentary Studies and Training
BSP Bahujan Samaj Party
CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women
CEW Committee for the Empowerment of Women
CPI Communist Party of India
CPI(M) Communist Party of India (Marxist)
DMDK Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam
DMK Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
DRSC Departmentally related standing committee
ECI Election Commission of India
GEM Gender Empowerment Measure
GOI Government of India
HRD human resource development
ICC Internal Complaints Committee
INC Indian National Congress
IPU
Inter-Parliamentary Union
JD(U) Janata Dal (United)
JPC joint parliamentary committee
LJP Lok Janshakti Party
LS Lok Sabha
MGNREGA Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
MLA member of legislative assembly
MP member of Parliament
MPLADS MP Local Area Development Scheme
MWCD Ministry of Women and Child Development
NCP Nationalist Congress Party
NDA National Democratic Alliance
NFIW National Federation of Indian Women
NREGA National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
NSFDC National Scheduled Castes Finance and Development Corporation
OBCs Other Backward Classes
OSCE Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
PDP People’s Democratic Party
PMK Paattali Makkall Katchi
PNDT pre-natal diagnostic techniques
RBS Royal Bank of Scotland
RJD Rashtriya Janata Dal
RLD Rashtriya Lok Dal
RS Rajya Sabha
RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
RTI right to information
SAD Shiromani Akali Dal
SCs Scheduled Castes
STs Scheduled Tribes
TDP Telugu Desam Party
TMC Trinamool Congress
TRS Telangana Rashtra Samithi
UPA United Progressive Alliance
VCK Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi
VHP Vishva Hindu Parishad
WEN workplace equality network
WIA Women’s Indian Association
WRB Women’s Reservation Bill
Acknowledgements
This book has been long in the making. Its journey begins in the conversations we had during the period of research as we worked on the Leverhulme Trust Programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (2007–11). So, first, we would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for the funding that made the research possible. Since then, we have also been supported by the Universities of York, Nottingham, and Warwick, UK, through small grants and study leave; we acknowledge this important contribution to our work. Carole Spary would also like to thank the British Academy, UK, for her small grant (SG131410) in 2013, which enabled research on two chapters of the book and supplementary research throughout the book, and the Economic and Social Research Council, UK, and University of Nottingham for a grant from the Impact Accelerator Fund (2017), which enabled highly fruitful conversations in India on the main findings of the book, helping us to incorporate insights from initial responses to our findings.
We would also like to thank most sincerely all the members of Parliament (MPs) who gave us their time—graciously and at times under difficult circumstances; they answered our questions and allowed us to probe their public and private lives. The stories they told (and did not tell) and how they told them provided us with a wonderfully granular picture of women in Parliament—who they are, what they do, and what are their ambitions and fears. Without their contribution, we would not have been able to write this book.
Parliamentary officers—especially the joint secretary of the Lok Sabha Secretariat, Ravindra Garimella—have been extremely helpful in our research; they provided us with institutional context, answered
procedural questions, and pointed us towards sources that we needed for our research. We would also like to thank the Parliament Secretariat in New Delhi, which provided us with access to the Parliament library to enable us to acquire official copies of debate proceedings from Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha debates. They also allowed us to access committee reports that were not available on the website, and reports and related literature on the Parliament, including some of the Parliament’s own in-house publications—particularly historical reports which are often difficult or impossible to source from elsewhere—in addition to those available on the Parliament’s extensive website. Access to the Parliament library also enabled us to look through the impressive newspaper archives. Both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha secretariats very kindly provided us with copies of selected audiovisual recordings of debates, which allowed us to analyse the performances alongside the transcripts of debates and added necessary layers of interpretation, including nonverbal performances of both those speaking and those not speaking but in attendance in the chamber and, occasionally, interesting absences.
In addition to the Parliament library, a number of institutions in New Delhi allowed us to access their collections: the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and the library at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS). This enabled access to some parliamentarians’ memoirs and autobiographies and biographies to supplement interview data on experiences of being an MP. Further, autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs were sourced from the British Library. We are also grateful to the many women’s activists who generously shared their insights and experiences on the topic and enabled us to see the contribution of women MPs and the Parliament’s engagement with women’s empowerment, gender equality, and gender justice from multiple angles.
We would also like to acknowledge the debt of many colleagues and friends who helped and encouraged us by discussing, reading, and commenting on drafts and challenging us to be clearer, more rigorous, and creative in our analysis: Katharine Adeney, Indu Agnihotri, Molly Andrews, Sarah Childs, Sunetra Choudhury, Emma Crewe, J. Devika, Susan Franceschet, Ravindra Garimella, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Ana Jordan, Kalpana Karunakaran, Vivien Lowndes, Fiona Mackay, Sudha Pai, Jennifer Piscopo, Jeremy Roche, Vidhu Verma, Georgina Waylen, and Andrew Wyatt. In addition, we would like to thank Kalpana Karunakaran (Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India), Indu Agnihotri (CWDS), Mandira Kala (PRS Legislative Research), and Japleen Pasricha and Asmita Ghosh (Feminism in India) for very
generously and professionally facilitating talks and workshops, and participants of those events for their generosity in sharing their thoughts, experiences, and responses in relation to our research.
Finally, Shirin would like to thank Jeremy Roche, Arjun, and Sean for their patience and their unstinting support during the writing of this book. Carole would like to thank Hazel and David Spary for their continued unconditional support and encouragement; Ana for always understanding; Gareth, Chloe, Emma, and Kerry for keeping her grounded and reminding her what is important; and especially Neil for his endless patience, cups of tea, intelligence, love, hugs, and humour.
Introduction
Traffic Jam
For seventy years I am caught in a traffic jam
A great rush is on at New Delhi’s Parliament Street: In a line to the right, people jostle and push No one knows since when;
To the left some other lines lie entangled; Have a look, men are standing, one upon another: Somebody is distributing seats, another is pulling chairs away; No one moves ahead, or steps aside.
I am caught in a traffic jam
For the last seventy years! (Gulzar, 2017)
Independent India has long claimed, and with much justification, to be the world’s largest democracy. Indian democracy is noisy, vibrant, and robust. It is multi-layered—elections are its lifeblood and are held every five years (or before, if a government falls prematurely) with vigour and drama at the local, state, and national levels. Despite all odds—narrow registers of party politics, limited nature of electoral representation, of social and economic inequality, high levels of violence and corruption, of reputational concerns about politicians, and norm erosion in political institutions—Indian democracy thrives, with high rates of citizen participation and legitimacy (see Table I.1). Broader still, Parliament is reported on and debated in a vibrant multilingual press and media, and is the subject of satire and humour (Mitra and Singh, 1999) as well
Table I.1 Turnout in Lok Sabha Elections: 1952–2004
Source: Election Commission of India (ECI), for 1st–14th Lok Sabhas, http://eci.nic. in/eci_main1/votingprecentage_loksabha.aspx; for 15th and 16th Lok Sabha elections, ECI statistical election reports for respective elections.
Note: *Also includes new voter category of ‘Others’ with a turnout of 7 per cent.
as sharp criticism and serious comment and debate. Parliament is, in short, the theatre of Indian democracy (Figure I.1). And yet, the cynicism and despair in the earlier poem by a pre-eminent contemporary Urdu poet, Gulzar, encapsulates the disappointment most people feel about the political institutions of India, in particular (as in many countries) about Parliament and its members. Its practices remind us that the radical political possibilities of democratic practice in independent India through its embrace of universal adult franchise continue to pose a massive challenge for the institutional infrastructure of this democracy. Parliamentary claims of representation also beg the question: how can India’s democratic institutions include all its citizens (see Jayal, 2013)? This is not a question faced only by the Indian Parliament; it is a question for all electoral democracies that make claims in wider democratic registers. The predominant way that democratic polities have squared this circle is through translating democracy into electoral representation—as logic and practice. However, this can only be a temporary,
incomplete, and anxiety-producing resolution in the context of complex contradictions that underpin societies. Given these limitations of electoral democracy, how do we emplace Parliament in Indian politics, democracy, and in the lives of Indian citizens?
There is relatively little literature on this institution that makes the claim of representing Indian democracy. There are very few critical reviews on the Indian Parliament (Shankar and Rodrigues, 2011; Pai and Kumar, 2014); some are useful descriptive histories of the Indian Parliament (Gupta, 2003; Kashyap, 2008), but overall we have a gap in the political science literature on one of the most important political institutions. Why is this? In addition, for us, the question also arises, why write a book about an institution that stands, at least in the public imaginary, for a political traffic jam—where social inequalities are reflected, reproduced, and performed? In particular, why write a book about women members of Parliament—what is so special about them?1 They hardly form a majority of membership and do not very often participate in parliamentary debates, or take up visible institutional roles, or
1 There is very little written on women parliamentarians in India; see Kumari and Dubey (1994), and Chopra (1993).
Figure I.1 Parliament House, Taken from Raisina Road Source: Carole Spary.
indeed sustain their participation over time. We answer this question by pointing out that gender as an axis of power (not just in India but in all societies and polities) is particularly fraught within the context of democratic institutions and practice. Given the claims that it makes for representation as well as for democratic practice where all are formally considered equal, we argue that Parliament is a particularly productive space to study these contradictions. We do this by first analysing what role Parliament plays in shaping political norms through its performance in a diverse and unequal society; performance not just as effectiveness but as claiming to symbolize Indian democracy and representativeness itself.
The claim is that parliaments as institutions not only represent different constituencies, identity groups and interests within a nation but also that they mirror society and that nation at large. [Their] authority and legitimacy are derived from this claim of representativeness, which in turn has to be underpinned by institutional norms and performed by its members—the legislators, the representatives—and accepted by its citizens. (Johnson and Rai, 2015: 1)
These claims are performed through modes of behaviour, institutional norms generated through debates, disruptions, and negotiations within parliamentary spaces as well in the media. The actors on its stage are divergent—they belong to different political parties and espouse different ideologies, their constituencies lie in different parts of the country, they speak different languages, follow different religions, come from different castes and social classes, dress differently, and, of course, are of different genders. Parliament might come across as a traffic jam, or even a car crash, but it does still symbolize one of the most important political features of postcolonial India—its democracy. The systematic exclusion or under-representation of a near half of the population challenges this claim; such under-representation cannot be justified if Parliament is to make a claim to represent all Indian citizens. This complex arc of membership is what performs representation in a democracy; evaluating how gender inequality runs through this institution, and the forms that representation takes as a result, is the focus of our book.
Gulzar’s poem encapsulates the ‘decline of parliament’ thesis in India,2 which nests within a discourse of ‘crisis of institutions’ more
2 The ‘decline of parliament’ thesis has been long in the making. See Bernard Crick, The Reform of Parliament (1964). It also has a wide geographic reach— see, for example, Elgie and Stapleton (2006) on Ireland; Herman and Lodge (1978) on European parliaments; and Robert B. Mattes on South Africa (2002).
generally—our interviewees, the media, and academic literature point to the falling standards of members (education, corruption, behaviour), debates and deliberation (quality, performance, disruption), and lawmaking (expertise, representativeness) and relations with the executive (Elgie and Stapleton, 2006; Pai and Kumar, 2014). Pai and Kumar point out that the concept of decline has been rather loosely used in the literature on the Indian Parliament—from low levels of accountability and oversight to low effectiveness of parliamentary functioning to criminalization of politics and Parliament members, which has led to a crisis of governability and the stagnation of institutions (Kohli, 1991: 402), to being undermined in its law-making function by non-state corporate actors in liberalized India (Kapur and Mehta, 2005). In this book, we do not overlook these issues and claims. Rather, we assess claim-making by trying to understand the work gender does in India’s Parliament: Does the persistent underrepresentation of women in Parliament affect our reception of the performance of representation and the claims to being a strong democracy in the broader politics of the country, and if so how? For example, we discuss how women’s disruptive behaviour in the chamber is received and presented in the media. This does not mean that we do not explore other vectors of representation—class, caste, and religion for example; we employ an intersectional frame to understand not just the formal rules and informal norms that govern Parliament but how gender performs in Parliament. Indeed we contextualize claim-making and analyse it in the setting of the gendered politics within Parliament in order to study what Corbett and Sweeney call ‘the multifaceted role played by parliaments’ (2014: 2).
In this book we provide a comprehensive analysis of women’s representation in the Indian Parliament, which we show is a deeply gendered institution. In so doing, we hope not only to further feminist theorizing on political representation, but also to provide a theoretically informed and empirically based analysis of continuities and change in the context of Indian politics. We do this within an innovative performance framework (outlined below), which focuses as much on rules and norms as on the corporeality and speech, stage and script of politics and political life. We also draw on, as well as critique, contemporary feminist approaches and methodologies in the study of gender and representation as we situate the experience of women MPs in the Indian Parliament by analysing both their place and their performance within the institution. The analysis presented in the book integrates the different levels of debate—the global, the national, and the local—to reveal their interconnectedness
in terms of circulation of ideas and the consequences of this circulation in terms of discursive and policy shifts in India. We situate our analysis in India’s history, its changing political economy, and its robust and yet peeling-at-the-edges political system. We argue that institutions can only be understood as embedded in the wider context of society; that we need to understand Parliament as an institution that is functional as well as symbolic and is enmeshed in networks of power that are themselves socio-economic as well as performative. In so doing, we agree with Saward, that ‘we need to move away from the idea that representation is first and foremost a given, factual product of elections, rather than a precarious and curious sort of claim about a dynamic relationship’ (2006: 298).
The Indian Parliament
At the time of Independence, although the Constituent Assembly examined non-parliamentary systems of governance, especially the presidential system AS in the United States, it chose to recommend the parliamentary system. B. R. Ambedkar (chairperson of the Constituent Assembly), while introducing the Draft Constitution in the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948, explained this choice thus:
The Parliamentary system differs from a non-Parliamentary system in as much as the former is more responsible than the latter but they also differ as to the time and agency for assessment of their responsibility. Under the non-Parliamentary system, such as the one that exists in the United States of America, the assessment of the responsibility of the executive is periodic. It takes place once in two years. It is done by the electorate. In England, where the Parliamentary System prevails, the assessment of responsibility of the executive is both daily and periodic. The daily assessment is done by members of Parliament, through questions, resolutions, no-confidence motions, adjournment motions and debates on Addresses. Periodic assessment is done by the electorate at the time of the election— which may take place every five years or earlier. The daily assessment of responsibility which is not available under the American system is, it is felt far more effective than the periodic assessment and far more necessary in a country like India. The Draft Constitution in recommending the Parliamentary System of executive has preferred more responsibility to more stability. (Cited in Khanna, 2008: 92–3)
Responsibility of holding the executive to account is at the heart of this choice—daily through questions, resolutions, debates, and, if necessary,
no-confidence motions. Of course, the other role of Parliament, which is equally important, is as the law-making body of the country. Once this choice was made, parliamentary institution and its procedures were drafted and membership organized.3
India is a bicameral parliamentary democracy. The lower house of Parliament is called the Lok Sabha (House of the People) and currently has 545 members. Of these, 530 members represent the states, up to 20 members represent Union Territories, and not more than 2 members of the Anglo-Indian Community can be nominated by the President, if not thought to be adequately represented in the House. The upper house is called the Rajya Sabha (House of the States), and now has 245 members. Representatives are elected on a first-past-the-post basis by single-member constituencies for the lower house, and proportional representation from state assemblies for the upper, in addition to a minority of members nominated by the President. As we have noted above, Parliament stands at the heart of this democracy—politically, symbolically, and performatively. With the exception of the internal Emergency between June 1975 and March 1977,4 and subject to varying incidents of socioeconomic violence (Jalal, 1995; Brass 2003), India has had 15 functioning Parliaments in which government legislation has been amended or withdrawn through opposition participation, and in which opposition parties have regularly defeated incumbent governments. More political parties are present in the national Parliament than at any time since Independence—7 national and 45 state-registered parties contested elections in 2009 (Election Commission of India [ECI], 2009e). Candidates from 40 of those parties were eventually elected in 2009 (ECI, 2009b, 2009c, 2009d). In 2014, 37 parties were elected to Parliament, including 12 single-member parties. In the Fifteenth Lok Sabha from 2009, more than half of the MPs, however, represented the two largest national parties, the Indian National Congress (INC, also known as the Congress) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and a broader group of MPs are
3 The membership of the Constituent Assembly was 299 and included representatives from Provincial Legislative Assemblies, the Indian Princely States, and the Chief Commissioners’ Provinces (http://164.100.47.194/loksabha/ constituent/facts.html). Only 15 members were women (Ravichandran, 2016).
4 In 1975, Mrs Gandhi, the then prime minister, declared a state of Emergency and suspended all civil rights. The pressure of the movement against the Emergency resulted in elections in 1977 when the Indian National Congress was defeated and an opposition government was formed for the first time since Independence.
shaped by the two opposing coalitions of parties led by these two dominant national parties, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) respectively.5 These two coalitions have broadly stabilized since the late 1990s after a period of fragmented coalitions and unstable governments in the 1990s. This followed a long period of decline of the Congress Party–dominance since the 1960s and particularly since the late 1980s (Sridharan, 2002; Yadav and Palshikar, 2006). Broadly speaking, these two coalitions are centre-left (UPA) and right-wing (NDA) on the political spectrum. In addition to the national parties, these coalitions have included smaller state-based parties which range across the political spectrum, from the right-wing Shiv Sena from Maharashtra to the Dravidian parties of south India, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), to the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) of Punjab, as well as the Trinamul (‘grassroots’) Congress Party of West Bengal, all of whom make regionalist claims but with very different approaches, and caste-oriented parties such as those of Uttar Pradesh, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Samajwadi Party (see Chapter 3). Smaller statebased parties have sometimes switched alliances based more on political expediency than ideology; coalition partners can find themselves allied at the national level but rivals at the sub-national level depending on the configuration of parties in India’s notably diverse party system; coalition partners can fall out over programmatic differences, as did the Congress and left parties in 2008, prompting a vote of confidence (see Chapter 5). These complex configurations have often made the Indian Parliament an intensely competitive institutional site for democratic politics.
Any Indian citizen who is registered as a voter and is over 25 years of age is allowed to contest elections to the Lok Sabha or state legislative assemblies. For the Rajya Sabha the age limit is 30 years. In the lower house 15 per cent of all seats are reserved for candidates drawn from the Scheduled Castes (SCs)6 and 7.5 per cent for Scheduled Tribes (STs) (Jayal, 2006b: 118). Both of these groups benefit from such affirmative action on the basis of long-standing material deprivation and social and
5 Although INC’s numbers in the Lok Sabha were much smaller after the 2014 election (from 200+ MPs to less than 50), creating a more fragmented opposition with state-based parties, INC still formed the largest party of the opposition and the two broad coalitions still applied.
6 Lower castes, called Schedule Castes after the 9th Schedule of the Indian Constitution in which this provision was made; also known as Dalits.
economic discrimination (see later). And yet, Velayudhan, the first and only Dalit woman to be elected to the constituent assembly in 1946, argued forcefully in the Constituent Assembly against such affirmative action, pointing to the fundamental contradiction between deep social inequality and the promise of electoral representation. She said:
As long as the Scheduled Castes, or the Harijans or by whatever name they may be called, are economic slaves of other people, there is no meaning demanding either separate electorates or joint electorates or any other kind of electorates with this kind of percentage. Personally speaking, I am not in favour of any kind of reservation in any place whatsoever. (28 August 1947)7
Just over 11 per cent of MPs in India’s lower house of Parliament are women; the world average is 23.6 per cent and the regional average (Asia) is 19.7 per cent. This puts India’s rank at 145 out of 193 in the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s league table for women’s representation in parliaments (as at 1 December 2017) and also affects India’s rank, 131, in the UNDP Gender Inequality Index (2017).8 The increase in women’s representation in the Indian political system has, therefore, been relatively small and slow. In fact, all the 333 individual women MPs ever elected to the Lok Sabha, from the 1st to the 16th, would not fill a single Lok Sabha, not even two-thirds, which further underscores the historical dominance of male MPs. Rather than increasing slowly over time, the number of women MPs in the upper house—the Rajya Sabha—from 1952 to now has fluctuated between 5 and 12 per cent, with a slightly higher representation of women in the 1980s compared to the 1990s (see Figure I.2).
Women MPs come from the full spectrum of politics—left, centrist, and right wing, from different parts of the country, from different castes and classes, professions, and religions. These differences are often marked through their dress, language, and accents; their positions within their parties and the prominence that they have or not affects their media presence and recognizability. Some women MPs from across the ideological spectrum have become closely associated with the institution of Parliament due to their leadership, contribution, and enduring parliamentary careers—Najma Heptulla (six terms) as the long-serving
7 Constituent Assembly Debates: http://164.100.47.194/loksabha/writereaddata/cadebatefiles/C28081947.html, last accessed on 12 June 2018.
8 See http://hdr.undp.org/en/data, last accessed on 27 October 2017.
Figure I.2 Women as a Percentage of Rajya Sabha MPs (1952–2016)
Source: Rajya Sabha (2008, 2014a and 2014b).
Deputy Chairperson of the Rajya Sabha (and longest-serving Rajya Sabha MP among both men and women), Meira Kumar (five terms) and Sumitra Mahajan (eight terms) as the first and second women speakers of the Lok Sabha respectively, and long-serving MPs such as Vijaya Raje Scindia (eight terms), Mamata Banerjee (seven terms), and Maneka Gandhi (seven terms) (see Chapter 4). Communist politician Geeta Mukherjee (seven terms) will forever be associated with her careerdefining contribution towards introducing the Women’s Reservation Bill (WRB) in 1996 as part of a political career spanning six decades. Meira Kumar’s election as the first female Lok Sabha speaker carried additional symbolic significance as one of the Congress party’s representatives from the Dalit community (Armitage, Johnson, and Spary, 2014). Others, however, including some with substantial parliamentary careers, have been less well-remembered due to a lack of memorialization of women’s presence in the Indian Parliament, particularly of female politicians from lower caste and regional or religious minority backgrounds,9 and 19501955196019651970197519801985199019952000200520102015
9 For example, until recently, some experienced women MPs had no presence on Wikipedia. Rano Shaiza and Dil Kumari Bhandari, the only women MPs ever elected from Nagaland and Sikkim respectively, had no profiles; neither did former women MPs Ganga Devi, Sukhbuns Kaur, and Minimata Agam Dass, each with five parliamentary terms. Saroj Kharpade, the joint secondlongest serving member in the Rajya Sabha among men and women MPs, had
with the passage of time, many have faded from public memory (see Chapters 2 and 4). This diminished collective history of the contribution of women MPs impacts contemporary narratives of women’s participation, their capabilities, performance, and rationales for greater inclusion. Despite much contemporary media interest in Parliament and its women members, little analysis has been done on the role women play in Parliament—the recruitment battles that they have to win, the negotiations they have to make not only in order to access parliamentary politics but also to survive in it, the narratives about politics that they employ in order to do so and how these are mediated not only by their gender but also their caste, class, and religion/ethnicity. Therefore, in focusing on women in Parliament, this book also casts a spotlight on the working of the institution by asking how representative it is as a gendered establishment. We situate our study of women in Parliament in its historical context—of colonialism, of a one-party dominant system, coalitions, and the rise of state-based politics. We study the institution of Parliament through examining its different facets and modes of working; we analyse its physical space, and show how male and female bodies traverse this space differently; we treat Parliament as a workspace and analyse the debates in which MPs participate by making speeches, disrupting communications, and which provide both opportunities and pitfalls for making and un-making reputations. We also see how all this is done—through the work of political parties, of parliamentary cadres, and through the labour of MPs as they perform representation within this confined and connected institution.
Studying Institutions: Why and How Does Parliament Matter?
Parliament matters: Nehru had referred to the ‘majesty of Parliament’ (Kapur and Mehta, 2005: iii) and called the Indian Parliament a ‘temple only three lines on her Wikipedia profile, and a number of women MPs elected from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe reserved seats with several terms had no profiles (for example, Kamla Kumari from Bihar and Bibha Ghosh Goswami from West Bengal, with four terms each). Several former Muslim women MPs had little to no profile (for example, Mofida Ahmed, Maimoona Sultan, Anis Kidwai, and Aziza Imam). In 2017 Carole Spary together with colleagues from Feminisminindia.com contributed to a campaign to improve the digital archive on women MPs (see https://feminisminindia.com/2017/08/01/indian-womenin-politics-wikipedia-edit-a-thon/, last accessed on 8 May 2017).
