Are reservations the right way of empowering women?

Excerpts from India Tonight on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » RELATED NEWS Rajya Sabha passes women's reservation bill

On Monday, the Women's Reservation Bill was presented in the Parliament for the fourth time amidst controversy and disruption. Are reservations the right way of empowering women? National Spokesperson Congress and Member of Parliament Manish Tewari; Samajwadi Spokesman Mohan Singh; the President of All India Democratic Women Association (AIDWA), Subhashini Ali and Professor of Political Science at Jawaharlal Nehru University Zoya Hasan, discuss.

Below is a verbatim transcript of the exclusive interview on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: Why does your party believe that reservation is the best way of increasing the number of women in the Lok Sabha? Why through reservations, why not through other means?

Tewari: For the simple reason that 60 years after the commencement of the constitution, the spirit embodied in Article 15 (3) needs to be taken to its logical conclusion. Political and economical empowerment of women is a constitutional principle, it's a constitutionally mandated responsibility. So the government is only doing what the framers of the constitution envisaged 60 years ago. It has taken time and in 60 years the experience has been that unfortunately political parties for all the rhetoric and women have not been able to walk the talk.

Q: Manish Tewari quoted Article 15 as the constitution, as legitimisation for what the government is doing, but I put it to you that that still doesn't explain why reservations. Why not instead avoid the controversy of reservations which raise hackles across the spectrum and opt for making it compulsory for parties to have to feel a certain percentage of women candidates at every election that would achieve the same result, but in a non-controversial way?

Hasan: You are right that reservation is not necessarily the best way, but in our context this is the only way. You will not be able to increase the number of women in Parliament unless you reserve constituencies.

Q: Why do you require parties to have to reserve 30% tickets for women?

Hasan: There are Scandinavian countries which have followed the party route, but they have a very different party system. In most Scandinavian countries you have three-four parties or five parties. We have something like 140 parties and the party route will not work in our system.

Q: You have to explain that.

Hasan: For e.g. the Samajwadi Party is expected to give 33% seats, but Samajwadi Party's support is essentially likely to win only in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and nowhere else.

Q: So they will have 33% seats in UP.

Hasan: No, but they can, they can give 33% seats in Maharashtra, in Rajasthan everywhere else. So the point is that the party route given the unevenness of support of political parties cannot ensure a critical mass of 33%.

Q: That maybe one explanation why reservation is necessary and you cannot simply rely on the party route, but what about the fact that once these reservations become part of the constitutional structure of the country, you already have 22.5% reservation for schedule caste and schedule tribe and although there is a slight overlap between the two you could end up with a situation where 45% of the seats in Parliament will be in one shape or another be reserved, which means that the freedom of choice of the voter is hugely constraint? Is that democratic?

Ali: I do not know what you are talking about freedom of the choice of voter because the freedom of the choice of the vote is anyway curtailed by the party system. The voter is forced to choose between the candidates put up by different parties, so there is no such thing as a perfect buffet of choice available to everybody. The point is this that are we interested in more women being there in Parliament and Vidhan Sabhas or not? If we are interested in more women being there, what is the number that we think should be there?