The career of the Women’s Reservation Bill in Parliament since it first appeared in 1996 as the 81st Amendment Bill, has been striking for the high drama and rhetoric of women’s rights that has accompanied it, the passionate opposition to the proposed 33% reservation for women in Parliament, generally being characterised by its supporters as anti-women and patriarchal. However, if we try to organize the welter of arguments that have been flying around for 13  years, we would find that while the proponents of the measure certainly base their claims on the idea of gender justice, the opposition to the Bill does not come from an anti-women position.  Rather, the latter arguments stem from either

1) a generally anti-reservation position (which I am not interested in here) or

2) a claim that reservations for women should take into account other disempowered identities within this group – that is, the “quotas within quotas” position, which says that there should be reservation within the 33% for OBC and Muslim women. (The 22.7% reservation for SC/ST women would come into operation automatically.)

In other words, the sharp opposition to the Bill cannot simply be dismissed as anti-women. Continue reading And aren’t OBC women “women”? Loud thinking on the Women’s Reservation Bill →