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A new formula for women's reservation

Mukesh Dalal

Despite several years of national consensus on women's reservation, we have miserably failed to put it down in the form of a law. Although several proposals have been made, I have not come across any which is fair, democratic and practical. The government's proposal, which seeks to reserve for women a third of all constituencies selected randomly by rotation, in addition to being undemocratic, will never be acceptable to the sitting MPs because a third of them will have to vacate their seats in the next election. Another well-known proposal, which would require each political party to nominate women in at least a third of all its contested constituencies, will encourage parties to nominate women to seats they least expect to win. Another proposal, which would add extra votes to the tally of women candidates, is blatantly undemocratic.

I will now present a novel proposal for women's reservation that is based on two key ideas. The first idea is to create some extra seats that are not assigned to any specific constituency. These "quota seats" will be filled only when there is a need to increase women's representation, that is, whenever the number of women "elected directly" falls below the desired "quota." The second idea is that women candidates who were closest to victory in constituencies not already represented by women will then be "elected by quota" to fill the appropriate quota seats. For all purposes, women elected by quota will be treated on par with men and women elected directly.

Suppose it is decided to create 50 quota seats in the Lok Sabha and set the women's quota to 181, which is one-third of 543 - the total seats. Now consider three different scenarios illustrated below, differing in the number of women getting elected directly:

Case 1: Only 44 women get directly elected, causing a shortfall of 137 from the women's quota of 181. In this case, all the 50 quota seats will be filled, increasing the strength of the house to 595, including 2 nominated seats. If this increase in strength to 595 is unacceptable, then the number of quota seats, the number of constituencies or both should be reduced before the elections.

Case 2: 150 women get directly elected, causing a shortfall of only 31 from the women's quota. In this case, only 31 quota seats will be filled, increasing the strength of the house to 576.

Case 3: 200 women get directly elected, exceeding the women's quota. In this case, no quota seat will be filled, keeping the strength of the house to 545.

Although "closest to victory" may be defined in several ways, the most reasonable would be to use the fractional margin of loss, that is, (votes of the winner - votes of the loser/ total votes). For example, a woman losing by 5,000 votes out of 200,000 valid votes will be chosen over a woman from another constituency losing by 4,000 votes out of 150,000 valid votes. This "normalisation" by total votes ensures that all constituencies are treated fairly, irrespective of their size.

Women closest to victory are those who are most likely to be elected directly in the next election. Note that execution of this formula is now extremely easy because of the advances in information technology.

Some obvious advantages of my proposal are as follows:

1. It will achieve reservation for women without discriminating against men. Men will not be undemocratically and unfairly prohibited to contest from any constituency and every voter will get the democratic right to vote for either a man or a woman. Thus, it would not cause any resentment against women.

2. Women candidates in any constituency will be eligible to be elected on quota seats. This will prevent discrimination against women contesting from constituencies not reserved for them.

3. Quota seats will be filled only when direct elections do not result in adequate representation for women. This adaptive approach would not distort direct elections.

4. Only women closest to victory will be elected on quota seats. This will improve the possibility of their directly winning the next election and making the quota seats available to women from other constituencies.

5. The representation of women will gradually increase over several elections, preventing unacceptable disruptions caused by a sudden artificial upsurges. This will also improve the quality of women representatives, since they will mature in a natural manner.

6. The representation of women will eventually increase to the desired level, and the quota seats will no longer be filled. In the above example, if we assume that the number of directly elected women increases each time by half the number of women elected by quota, then the desired representation of women will be achieved in five elections. Thus, this reservation system will liquidate itself over the long-term, instead of getting permanently entrenched.

7. It will motivate political parties to nominate winnable women candidates, since this is the best way to also ensure their election by quota.

8. It will motivate people to vote for women candidates. A vote for a woman will be more "effective", since it may get two shots at electing her. Note that this discrepancy will vanish as soon as women get adequate representation.

9. It will motivate all sitting MPs (elected directly or by quota) and potential candidates to nurture their constituencies on a long-term basis, since they never will be prohibited from contesting there.

10. It will not lead to women contesting and winning only the constituencies reserved for them, as has happened in the SC/ST case. Moreover, women will not be artificially restricted to contesting only against women, stunting the growth in their leadership qualities.

Some potential drawbacks of my proposal are as follows:

1. It will increase the strength of the Lok Sabha, unless the number of constituencies is reduced. Recall that Justice Rajinder Sachar has already recommended increasing the strength of Lok Sabha to 750.

Although reducing the number of constituencies may be opposed by sitting MPs, they will prefer it to the Women's Reservation Bill for two reasons -- this reduction will be much less than a third of the total strength (proposed in the bill) and MPs would be eligible to contest their own, possibly, larger constituencies. Note that the 2001 census will provide us with a fresh opportunity to revise constituencies.

2. The actual strength of the Lok Sabha will not remain fixed -- it will depend on how many quota seats are filled based on the election results. This is not without precedence -- the President is currently allowed to nominate up to 2 Anglo-Indians if their representation is deemed inadequate.

3. A man-woman pair contesting a constituency may attempt to engineer the outcome so that the man gets directly elected and the woman gets elected by quota. This, however, will not happen unless the man is willing to risk losing.

4. Some constituencies will have two representatives, potentially causing some conflict between them. Since their competition may actually benefit the constituency, this may encourage people to vote for women candidates.

5. A man-woman pair may keep getting elected from the same constituency. This is not likely to happen very often and may not even be undesirable if it happens.

6. It is completely untested. I am not aware of any election anywhere in the world where such an approach has been tried. This proposal is just a product of my imagination.

My proposal naturally extends women's reservation to constituencies reserved for SCs and STs, by requiring that the quota seats and women's quota be distributed proportionately. In the above example, suppose 16 pc constituencies (86 of 543) are reserved for SC and 8 pc0 (43 of 543) are reserved for ST. The 50 quota seats will get distributed in the same proportion: 8 for SC and 4 for ST. The women's quota of 181 will also get distributed similarly: 28 for SC and 14 for ST. Now suppose the 44 directly elected women include 12 from SC and 2 from ST. It follows that out of 50 women elected by quota, 8 will be SC and 4 will be ST (see the next figure).

In general, the constituencies may be grouped in any manner, before or after the elections, as long as the quota seats and the women's quota are also grouped proportionately. This principle enables us to also handle the situation when results get delayed, for whatever reasons, in a significant number of constituencies. The delayed constituencies can then be grouped together so that women's reservation may be applied to them as described above for SC and ST groups. This technique may not work well if a very small number of results are delayed, for example, fewer than 10 (this cut-off needs to be carefully selected). For example, if only 3 results are delayed, then a better approach will be to delay filling 3 quota seats until those 3 results are also declared. A description of some other natural extensions of my proposal, for example, allowing multiple quotas for overlapping groups, is available in a longer document that also argues for its use in most kinds of reservations.

I believe that there are good arguments against the very concept of reservations for disadvantaged groups -- they are inherently discriminatory, they encourage resentment against these groups leading to more disadvantages, and they get perpetually entrenched. However, I do not know of any other effective way to nullify the effects of centuries of injustice suffered by some of these groups. I think of reservation as a necessary evil, which has been accepted by an overwhelming majority of Indians. Our continuing challenge is to either find a better way to ameliorate these disadvantages or to find the least unpalatable forms of reservations. My proposal aims to do the latter over the short term, while leading to the former over the long term.

In conclusion, I propose the following course of action. The Election Commission, in consultation with the government and the political parties, should come up with the acceptable numbers for women's quota, quota seats and constituencies, for the Lok Sabha and all state assemblies. These numbers should be used to draft a new women's reservation bill based on this proposal, which should then be tabled in Parliament for debate and approval. In parallel, I hope to see a constructive public debate for removing the remaining wrinkles from this proposal.

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