Vijayan, PK, PhD student

By Katherine Harrison on 23 Apr | 0 comments

GEXcel project (Theme 2):

This project seeks among other things, to theorise an understanding of ‘patriarchy’ as ‘masculine hegemony’. Drawing on and continuing with my ongoing work, the proposed project, as a specific part of the larger project, will focus on working out the utility (or not) of the understanding of patriarchy as masculine hegemony with regard to the question of embodiment. To do so it will first argue for the process of embodiment itself as a gendered one, and then examine the ways in which specific hegemonic orders get embodied (in the double sense of the bodies of its subjects as well as the material incarnations of the hegemonic ‘body’ itself: institutions, organisations, laws, policies, etc), and the gendering of that process. Of necessity here it will examine and engage the related ideas of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and ‘the hegemony of men’. Since any given social context is traversed by multiple hegemonic orders, this project will choose to undertake the analysis of embodiment on the register of the hegemony of the nation and the nation-state, examining embodiment and its gendering in both senses identified above. The site of analysis in both instances will be the masculine hegemony of Hindu nationalism and the putative Hindu nation. The underlying intent of the project is to use the opportunity to test the thesis of patriarchy as masculine hegemony – both, in terms of its usefulness for understanding the processes of embodiment, and in terms of the broader research themes being examined by GEXcel.

GEXcel project (Themes 3 & 6)

The Intersectionalities of the Women’s Reservation Bill
The current status of the controversial Women's Reservation Bill, which seeks to reserve 33% of the seats in Parliament and state legislative bodies for women, is that it has been approved by the Rajya Sabha (or Upper House of the Parliament) but has run into serious political difficulties in the more powerful Lok Sabha (or Lower House). The bill seeks to reserve 181 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha and 1,370 out of a total of 4,109 seats in the 28 State Assemblies, for women. Referred to in legal terms as the Constitution (108th Amendment) Bill, it has found strong opposition both within and outside the ruling Congress-led coalition. Despite promising to introduce the Bill in the last session of the Lok Sabha, the ruling United Progressive Alliance did not do so; the explanation was that it was seeking cross-party consensus, and the political process for arriving at that could not be completed before the end of the Parliamentary session.
This paper is part of a larger research project on the way in which caste, class and gender intersect and integrate in social and political formations in India. The project itself will seek to elaborate the historical and conceptual bases underlying this intersection/integration, and then explore its implications for the specific issue of the Women’s Reservation Bill. This paper therefore intends to set out some of key elements in the social and political process that has animated the controversy surrounding the Bill, as a means of offering a preliminary sketch of both, the conceptual issues involved as well as of the Bill itself. It therefore seeks to explore (some of) the ways in which gender, class and caste have come together around this issue. For the sake of brevity, I will present these here as a set of points:

The various questions and problematics thrown up by the proposed amendment to the constitution include:

1. Is the Bill working with an understanding of achieving critical numbers of women parliamentarians? Or is it about proportional representation? In either case, the quota should have been 50%, and not 33%; it has not been made entirely clear why this particular figure has been settled on.

2. The Bill is being projected as a means of ensuring political empowerment for women. Given this, some additional issues come up for consideration:
   a. In the case of other socio-economically backward groups, there has been consistent, strong and effective resistance to the idea of a ‘separate electorate’ – another form of quota reservation – for backward and/or marginalized groups, from pre-Independence times: e.g., the controversy over the Minto-Morley Reforms, the debates between Ambedkar and the Congress, Jinnah and the Congress, and then between Ambedkar and Gandhi, over this very question. However, with independence and the formation of the Indian Parliament, 122 of the 543 seats were reserved for the most backward communities of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
   b. Alongside this, the state – controlled predominantly and almost continuously by upper caste interest groups – sought to strengthen the socio-economic position of such marginalized/backward groups/political constituencies in relation to the rest of the citizenry, through programs of reservations in education and employment. The idea was that this would lead to empowerment, and would enable these groups to participate effectively in political processes, in development, in nation and community building, etc.
   c. In the case of women, however, there has been little or no real interest till recently to ensure political empowerment – i.e., to ensure women’s involvement and agency in the political structures of governance and administration. Instead, there have been a series of reforms from the early C19th, which have been essentially social in nature – stopping of child marriage and sati, promoting widow remarriage and education for women, etc – which have continued right down to the recent passing of a Domestic Violence Bill. The intent of these reforms has been the transformation of the patriarchal structures within which women exist. They have addressed and sought to redress such practices as confinement to the domestic space, controlled access to the public sphere, ensuring equal access and opportunities, equal wages for employed women, maternity leave, etc.

3. The current controversy is because, over the past two decades, there has been a visible and dramatic change in the social profile of the political arena, at both the national and state levels, whereby political parties essentially representing backward caste groups have gained in prominence in the electoral system, and have been enjoying a much greater degree of political agency. They tend to see the Women’s Reservation Bill as eating into their recent political success. Their arguments tend to be mainly that the Bill will simply ensure that upper class and upper caste women will gain political power, at their expense, as well as at the expense of the women of their communities.

4. There has been less resistance to representation for women at the Panchayati Raj level. Panchayati Raj is a three-tier system of local self-governance, from the village to the district levels, and is confined for now to 8 states. It is part of a larger process of de-centralization. The lack of resistance to reservation for women here is probably because of confidence at this level that women could be controlled, and that they would protect community interests. But at the state and national levels, the quantum of power that individuals in political seats would exercise increases dramatically.

5. In the Panchayati Raj, caste and class play a major role in ensuring that power remains localized, limited and ineffective; this stymieing of power (by, for instance, the central and state bureaucracies) can’t happen so easily at the state and national levels.

6. Opposition to the women’s bill is because gender is intersected by caste and class: the political opposition in Parliament insists on treating women as a heterogeneous category.

Given all the complexities of heterogeneity of the Indian nation-state, reservation for women could become cited as a precedent for reservations for other marginalities – caste, religious community, etc. This consequently has very significant implications for the understanding and operating of a democratic polity in the Indian context.

Biographical notes:

PK Vijayan is a senior lecturer with the department of English, Hindu College, Delhi University. He is also registered as a doctoral fellow with the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. His doctoral research is on the relations between gender, specifically men and masculinity, and Hindu nationalism in India. His other research interests include gender, sexuality and literature.