The lower house of India’s parliament on Wednesday approved the bill that would set aside a third of MP seats for women, after several unsuccessful attempts to pass it in recent decades.
A total of 454 MPs voted for the bill and two against it.
“The proposal (bill) was passed with a two-thirds majority of members present in the House,” Parliament Speaker Om Birla said.
According to government data, out of 788 Indian MPs since the last national election, only 104 are women, or just over 13%.
These figures reflect a general underrepresentation of women in Indian public life.
According to government data, almost a third of India’s workforce last year was made up of working-age women.
The bill presented on Wednesday proposes a constitutional amendment to allocate women a quota of one-third of the seats in the country’s lower house and state assemblies.
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For its adoption, a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Parliament is required. Entry into the upper house is virtually guaranteed thanks to the broad political support the project enjoys. Then it requires the approval of half of India’s 28 states.
The quota cannot be applied until India’s constituencies are redrawn after the immense undertaking of counting 1.4 billion people. The event planned for 2021 had to be postponed indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s a complicated process,” Jagdeep S. Chhokar, co-founder of civil society group Association for Democratic Reforms, told AFP.
“These exercises will last at least two or three years, if not longer,” he added. “Therefore, it can be implemented only after 2026-2027, which is a long time in Indian politics.”
“Injustice towards women”
But Sonia Gandhi, whose main opposition Congress party supports the bill, is pushing to speed up its entry into force.
“The immediate implementation of the bill is not only necessary, but also possible,” she stressed during the debates in parliament, “any delay in implementation would be an injustice to women.”
The bill was first introduced in 1996, but has failed to secure a majority of votes in Parliament, unlike any of the six attempts to pass it since then.
Over the years, the bill has faced strong opposition from some political parties in the north of the country.
In 2010, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, Mulayam Singh Yadav, opposed the bill, arguing that if passed it would prompt MPs to boo their parliamentary colleagues.
The passage of this law is expected to benefit Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is seeking a third term next year, and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is already popular among women.
According to an India Today poll, 46% of Indian women voted for the BJP and its coalition allies in the last national elections in 2019, compared to 44% of men.
The world’s largest democracy was the second country in the world to appoint a woman as prime minister, Indira Gandhi, in 1966, six years after Sri Lanka’s Sirimavo Bandaranaike, but the current proportion of female lawmakers is among the lowest in the world. Asia.
Droupadi Murmu is currently the country’s president and the second in India’s history to hold this essentially ceremonial role.
Other women have been or are prime ministers and party leaders and hold positions of power without women benefiting from broader political representation.
Several Asian countries have laws setting quotas for women in parliament, including India’s neighbors Nepal and Bangladesh.