Women’s reservations: Bengal has always led the way in this area

After the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, approved the Women’s Reservation Bill, it would be interesting to consider one part of the “one-thirds quota” controversy that West Bengali lawmakers are not willing to let go of and why should they? Politicians in West Bengal are pointing out how the state has been enforcing a policy of up to one-third representation of women in positions of power, whether intentionally or unintentionally, before the Central government pats itself on the back for convening a Special Session of Parliament to discuss, debate, and push through the historic bill. This Monday, Derek O’Brien, a Trinamool Rajya Sabha member, noted that women made up “one-thirds” of his party’s presence in Parliament.

Nine of Trinamool’s twenty-three MPs are female, he said, making that percentage right there about 40%. The ferocious Trinamool leader, who was making a point about how women’s rights and the significance of representation by women was an integral part of the ethos of Trinamool—which, incidentally, is currently led by the only woman chief minister in the country—also made a joke about how the Bharatiya Janata Party, on the other hand, has only 14% women representatives as Members of Parliament.

The Tri-namool provided seventeen women with tickets to run for the forty-two seats during the most recent general elections, which amounted to almost forty percent reservation.

Including the Trinamool. The old Left Front Government was among the first to attempt to implement the practice of reservation for women, notably at the level of the local, rural administrations, according to Communist parties, which dominated West Bengal for 34 years. Sujan Chakraborty, the head of the Communist Party of India (Marxists), said in an interview with The Statesman that “the Left parties had discussed the importance of having women as representatives in governments from as early as 1978” (the year after the Left Front Government came to office). In each of the gram panchayat elections, the Left fielded two female candidates. But it couldn’t be put into practice until the rural elections in 1988, and then the rural elections in 1993, five years later, he said.

But the Left parties were the first to show their support for women’s reservations, and Chakraborty stated, “We feel that it should have been done long ago.” The adage “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow,” attributed to the legendary social reformer Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, seems to be pertinent once again in the debate over the women’s reservation bill.