by Nirmala Carvalho

New law sets aside one third of the seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house) and State Assemblies for women. Various Church leaders comment on the issue.

New Delhi (AsiaNews) – “By passing the bill securing 33 per cent of seats in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies, 14 years after it was first introduced, India's Rajya Sabha (upper house) made history today, 9 March 2010,” said renown theologian Fr Augustin Kanjamala. The vote “opens a new chapter in women's struggle for gender equality and power sharing,” he said. Fr Kanjamala is a former director of the Institute of Indian Culture, and a former secretary of the Commission for Mission of the catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI). He spoke to AsiaNews yesterday about the new law, which reserves 181 seats for women in the 543-member Lok Sabha and 1,370 seats out of a total of 4,109 in the country’s 28 State Assemblies.

“Women have suffered enormous difficulties for millennia because India is a patriarchal society, like most other societies. Our women are discriminated, starting in the home, in each strata of society, up to the parliament. Unequal access to education, health care, property and power is taken for granted by the unthinking and powerless majority,” he said.

“The euphoria generated by the historic event should not ignore the violent objections by a powerful minority in parliament. There is no legal mechanism to ensure women representation from Other Backward Communities (OBC), Muslims and other minorities. Fighting and winning elections cannot be achieved without adequate economic resources, political connections and wide ranging social networking,” he added. In fact, “Even though some sitting MPs and MLAs will naturally lose their seats by allotting more seats to women, [. . .] they might be compensated by having their wives, daughters and close relatives replace them, as it has happened in the past.”

In this sense, the new law is “for women of tomorrow”, those who can work as lawmakers without being manipulated by somebody else.

Mgr Albert D'Souza, archbishop of Agra and CBCI secretary general, welcomed the new law adopted by the upper house of parliament. A similar bill was adopted by the Lok Sabha 14 years ago but was voted down by the Rajya Sabha.

For Fr Paul Thelakat, spokesman for the Syro-Malabar Church and editor-in-chief of the Satyadeepam (Light of Truth) weekly, the event was also historic. However, he cautioned that two dangers lie ahead.

It is one thing, he said, for “Women to enter Parliament and the Assemblies, but it is another for them to perform as parliamentarians. If they cannot, they will be simple numbers, domesticated by men, and become their shadows. The second danger is for women in parliament and other areas to become the so-called emancipated women, which means masculine women who ape men in their emancipation.”

Indian democracy instead needs the distinct contributions of both men and women,

• india
• law
• equality
• quota
• parliament
• lok
• sabha
• rajya
• church
• catholics
• reserve