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New Delhi, March, 9 : As Parliament got
steamed up over the women’s bill today, the woman in the street
appeared uninterested.
From corporate employees to website editors to illiterate grandmothers,
many women The Telegraph spoke to said the noise over the bill was
so much fuss about nothing.
“There shouldn’t be reservation in Parliament for women.
I think women are competent enough to enter Parliament without any
quota,” said Antara Nag, a technical writer, but added that
she supported reservation for women in panchayats.
“There are very strong women who have come through in the
panchayats; they should be allowed to move upwards. This bill will
create a new breed of women, mostly wives of politicians or spouses
of industrialists and actors, who will grab the seats that these
ground-level workers deserve.”
If this barb about the elite bucks up Mulayam Singh and Lalu Prasad,
the “wives of politicians” bit may not be too palatable
— both Yadavs have fielded women from their families in elections.
Suman Devi, 75, echoed Nag. “Our leaders should be from among
us…. They should fight standing on the same ground as men,”
said the grandmother of five who travels by the Delhi Metro every
day to meet her friends and family in other parts of the city.
“I never taught my daughters to accept any favours because
they are women. I am illiterate but gave the same opportunity to
my male and female children to educate themselves and fight their
own battles, at home and at work. These women whom I see on television
or the newspapers every day seem well educated and refined; so why
do they need reservations?”
Her namesake Suman Raj, an employee of a multinational, who was
born in a poor Dalit family in Uttar Pradesh, too supported reservation
only at the panchayat level.
“What’s going to change for us if the bill is passed?”
she said. “I went to college over my parents’ opposition
and even did my PhD, and today my salary is on a par with my husband’s.
If I could do it, so can all the women who dream of becoming parliamentarians
— they don’t need reservation.”
To Aparna Joshi, editor, Radiomusic.com, the bill is a piece of
“tokenism”.
“It may end up being a front for men to grab power through
their wives who get elected from reserved seats. It’s time
we stopped treating women in this country as another breed and started
treating them as equals — at school, at the workplace and in
Parliament,” she said.
“Women need equal opportunity to study, work, voice their
opinion. Quotas like these are not enough to change the mindset
of a patriarchal society. If all the women in this country could
get equal opportunities with the men throughout their lives, reservations
like these would become redundant.”
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