With its superior budgets, the Bharatiya Janata Party may claim a win for today, but its actions are body blows to the democratic spirit of the nation
The issue of women’s reservation in the Lok Sabha should have been a straightforward affair. The government says it wants it; the Opposition is all for it. Yet, what the nation got was not reservation for women but a bill that was designed to fail. The BJP has now gone on the offensive after the collapse of the bill, almost as if the entire purpose was to take the political discourse to a new level of confrontation and bitterness against the Opposition. This is the sorry state Indian democracy has reached in recent times.
Led by the BJP, this is a culture that has fashioned politics in the image of a boxing ring in which the Opposition must be surprised, shocked and knocked out every step of the way. The issues surrounding the women’s reservation are only the latest example of trickster politics contributing to a climate of increased the political heat, reduced trust and the erasure of any scope for bipartisan actions that should be a part of everyday governance in a democracy.
Consider that the bill linked to reservation for women (The 131st Constitution Amendment Bill) arrived in the midst of important state elections that are hotly contested. Without any prior circulation or consultation, the bill that needs two-thirds majority in the House was brought in with surprise clauses – a new and hurried delimitation exercise that would increase the Lok Sabha seats from 543 to 850, with 33% of the increased strength reserved for women before the 2029 polls. The government would have known that such a wild change will not pass without due consultation and a prior agreement. The inevitable collapse of the bill then became the ground for a renewed attack against the Opposition as part of the BJP’s election campaign.
Quite obviously, the bill was opposed by the southern states. Passing the bill meant that they would lose seats by proportion as their populations have reached fertility or near-fertility levels while the northern, BJP-controlled states would gain seats despite (or because of) poorer development efforts. This is inevitable since delimitation seeks to normalise populations that the representatives of the people serve so that a larger population means more seats in the Lok Sabha.
Further, how can a government that has never built confidence with the Opposition be trusted with redrawing parliamentary boundaries in a delimitation process that is not due for several years yet? Lack of support for such a plan was obvious.
Yet came the bill, followed by its expected collapse, and the BJP appeared to use this as fodder for a new slanging match to present itself as supporter of women’s reservation while the Opposition was painted black. The sorry episode was made worse by the 8.30 pm address to the nation on April 18 which reduced a high public office to a party appendage amid important state elections. Instead of a non-partisan explanation of the fiasco over the bill, the address was more in the nature of pamphleteering for and by the BJP.
The Prime Minister named the Opposition parties and blamed them for not wanting reservation for women when the issue at stake was deep mistrust in the government and its short-term agenda for the 2029 elections. In the process, an opportunity to rise as a statesman-leader who was duty-bound to explain, clarify and bring the nation together was lost. The loss may count for nothing in the playbook of BJP, but it marks one more notch down on the slippery slope towards a breakdown of trust that further reduces the space for engaging across the aisle. The Prime Minister’s special address to the nation has never in the past been used for a slanging match.
Meanwhile, the issue of reservation has now been left languishing with more political noise that does not serve the real question: how can the government find pathways to implement reservations for women here and now as the Opposition has indeed demanded, without waiting for a new delimitation process and all the contentious issues that it brings.
Over the weekend, the DMK introduced a private members constitution amendment bill to implement 33% reservation of seats for women based on the current Lok Sabha strength sans delimitation or census reports.
In sum, what the entire exercise achieved was the breakdown of what is sometimes described as vertical trust and horizontal trust. The former is between the ruling class and the people who elect them. The elected are trusted to serve the needs of the electors. The latter is trust among citizens, who must jointly work the levers of the democratic state and its institutions to watch and exert the required pressure to keep the rulers in check.
A balanced give-and-take is thus the life blood of a democratic order. But as a vocabulary of violence takes hold and as shriller voices are encouraged, they shrink the space for civil discourse and reduce democratic voices. The resultant reduced trust signals a declining democratic order that should be the biggest worry for the nation at this stage. The bill that failed thus tells the deeper story of all that is going wrong in the Indian democracy, bit by bit, in areas that are clearly visible and sometimes in many invisible ways.
The tone set at the top is liable to be mimicked by party leaders and workers down the line so that the same concoction of violent language, threats or bullying will be tried out in a hundred other ways in situations across the country that may never hit the headlines but will deliver their tiny blows to break democracy and turn people off.
The Billion Press (Jagdish Rattanani is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR.)
