The Hindu Business Line : Will laws for women lead to true empowerment?

The movement toward the empowerment of women is gathering force across the country. Parliament has passed Bills meant to protect women against domestic violence and harassment elsewhere. It has also amended the Hindu Succession Act, conferring on the girl-child coparcenary rights as also of domicile.

The winter session of Parliament will have, on its agenda, the Women's Reservation Bill that will ensure women representatives form at least one-third of the members of State Legislative Assemblies, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha.

The National Women's Commission is attentive to cases of women's hardships and often hauls up and reads strictures to the husband and the in-laws of the harassed woman.

What do women, particularly those in the countryside, think about this new cascade of liberties? The Shetkari Mahila Aghadi (SMA), the largest organisation of rural women with a record of transferring agricultural landed property to women (Laxmi Mukti) as also enabling their political empowerment, recently carried out an exercise to discover the facts.

The preliminary conclusions of the study are startling and astonishingly insightful, if occasionally somewhat rustic.

Women's Reservation Bill

Putting a third of the seats in the legislature in women's hands would be desirable as that can shake up the existing network of political vested interests.

It does not matter whether reservation is ensured with the existing number of seats in the House or an increased number. If the electoral system of reservations for women is based on a lottery-cum-rotation system, it would spell disaster. At the initial stage, in the lots drawn to decide the first set of seats reserved for women, there could be a mismatch between the availability of deserving men or women candidates and the results of the lottery.

At the end of the first election, neither the men nor the women would be sure of being able to contest from the constituencies that have chosen them, thus affecting the servicing of the constituencies by the elected representatives. Further, at any given time, the proportion of second-term representatives will be no more than 33 per cent; and a third-term Member of Parliament an extreme rarity. Gone would be the days of MPs and MLAs being elected seven-eight times in succession. The introduction of a proportional representation system in the place of the first-past-the-post system, with the rider that every party should file a list of candidates, in which every third name would be that of a woman, might be a much better method.

This might, in fact, enable abolition of reservation for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Alternatively, any three contiguous constituencies, giving effect to the recommendations of the Delimitation Commission, can be clubbed together to form a single three-member constituency, where one seat will be reserved for women. The voting will be multiple-choice. If a woman candidate gets the largest number of votes amongst all the contesting men and women, she will be deemed to have been elected on a general seat. A candidate who gets the largest number of votes among other women candidates will win the women's seat.

The advantage is that the actual number of women in any House may exceed a third of the total number of seats. It has the further advantage that every voter — man or woman — would have the chance to vote for a woman candidate every time.

Further, there would be no uncertainty about the constituency from which an elected representative can contest subsequent elections. It would thus eliminate the danger of poor servicing of constituencies, which are the inevitable features of the lottery-come-rotation system proposed in the present Bill.

Amendment To Succession Act

Under the new legislation, a girl child enjoys coparcenary rights. That is, she is entitled to an equal share in the inherited property, exactly like a male sibling.

On the death of the father, the daughter, married or otherwise, also gets an equal share of his self-earned property, along with her brothers and mother. She also has a claim of inheritance of the property in the house she has married into.

It would appear that the drafters of the Bill have not given sufficient attention to the problems of women's property rights in the patrilocal (relating to residence with a husband's kin group or clan) society. It is still a moot point if after the death of a married woman the property inherited by her will be treated as `streedhan'. It would appear more than probable that on her death the property inherited from the parents will go back to the parental house, to any of the surviving siblings and all nephews and nieces. There is hardly any point establishing a legal right to property and undergoing contentious litigation with members of the family of birth, if the property has to go back to where it came from.

The entanglement of women's property rights in a patrilocal society can be much better resolved by an anomaly with partnerships under the Partnership Act. Both the family of birth and the family by marriage will be treated as partnerships, in which the girl-child gets an equal share, along with her siblings living at the time of her birth.

At the time of her marriage, there should be an assessment of the assets and liabilities of the family of her birth and the girl is allowed to migrate to her family by marriage with her share of the property. The married woman's share in the property of the family by marriage would be equal to the proportion between the net assets of that family and the amount the bride has brought from the parents' house. In the eventuality of a break-up of the partnership in the family by marriage, she would again get the same share of the property as on the date of the break-up — that may have expanded or shrunk since the date of the marriage.

Rural women have a further difficulty, which the Bill does not take into account. Agricultural land is an immovable asset. As a consequence, the married daughter or a widowed daughter-in-law staying with her parents finds it extremely difficult to assert her right to property. For centuries, the father and the brothers of the bride have resolved the problem by making a lump-sum payment to the family by marriage and endowing jewellery on the bride.

A large number of farmer women appeared to prefer the present system. Only some of them consider that some system of converting land into equity would overcome the problem of the immovable character of agricultural land.

It is rather remarkable that many rural women do not consider that the present pieces of legislation have been drafted after mature consideration.

(The author, Founder of the Shetkari Sanghatana, is a Rajya Sabha MP. Feedback can be sent to sharad.mah@nic.in)

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