Give them quota, only women can save India!

N Sathiya Moorthy on why Parliament needs to pass the controversial Women's Bill.

First, it was over Helen of Troy. Or, was it over Sita in the Ramayan? The former launched a thousand ships, all of men, at war with one another. Over the latter, god, men, monkeys and demons, all went to battle. If age could not whither Cleopatra's beauty, nor could it resist her temptation of putting Mark Antony and Augustus Caesar against each other. This, not to mention her making a dancing doll of the mighty Julius Caesar himself.

That way, you cannot blame Sharad Yadav and G M Banatwala if they get overtly excited, when it comes to fighting over women's rights. Maybe, they are not fighting for women's rights, as you would like them to do, but fighting, they are good at doing.

And what greater man can Sharad Yadav take on than the prime minister of the land. So what if Inder Kumar Gujral comes from the same party of which Sharad Yadav is the working president? You cannot stand on niceties when it comes to fighting on women, can you?

It is one thing that Sharad Yadav joined issue with the prime minister when he questioned the government seeking to reserve 33 per cent of parliamentary seats for women through a special law. But it is another matter that he is the working president of the Janata Dal, and thus the voice of the janata or people.

After all, his is a party that has taken after the Janata Party of the seventies, in name, fame and culture, and what a Madhu Limaye could do then, Sharad Yadav should do better. Did not Madhu Limaye stall the anti-defection law proposed by the Morarji Desai government in a similar fashion? And what's political evolution all about, if it cannot bring out the animal in you, that too when the issue is all about playing to the fair sex?

It is also another matter that Sharad Yadav is out there to protect the interests of the downtrodden among the downtrodden, if that's what is the womenfolk among the Scheduled Castes, Backward classes and the ilk is all about. He cannot be blamed that he wants to lend a helping hand in uplifting his own womenfolk to occupy the centre-stage of politics and public life.

His own ambitions are smaller, and his intentions, pure. He doesn't fear that men like him would have to make way if his womenfolk climb up the ladder. As the saying goes, it is the women who have to fear women. The rural women having to fear their elitist urban counterparts.

You cannot thus grudge Sharad Yadav his reservations. Nor can you complain if Muslim League leader G M Banatwala says that the proposed law is bad. After all, he has to protect the interests of all the Muslim womenfolk. He for one knows they are all behind purdah and have none else to speak for them other than himself. And why fear, when he is there, and why should they speak after all, when Banatwala can do all the talking on their behalf?

Which only means that Ram Vilas Paswan is talking for and on behalf of the two faces of womanhood in the land, one urbane and elitist fit for the social circuit, and the other, rural and rustic, ready to keep home in a distant village, when he says that they do need reservations. And he should know better.

Whoever said that the women of India are still emaciated and emasculated, have only to go to Laloo Yadav's Bihar and Mulayam Yadav's Uttar Pradesh. Don't you remember the frail and old woman member of the Lok Sabha who kept jumping the gun when Parliament was discussing the Vajpayee government's failed confidence vote last year? She was a mud-kiln worker -- and who said she represented the urban woman, or who said she is a product of seat reservations for women?

It's anybody's guess what a Phoolan Devi would have been, had it not been for Mulayam Yadav taking pity on the woman, and doing something for her social upliftment. If you say she needed reservations, what would you say of all the men who caused her the plight that pushed her to the wall? Even a worm turns, and women in this country are worse off than worms, didn't you know?

That way, behind every successful man is a woman. And behind every successful woman should be 32 others, if you take all the numbers in their hundreds. Don't you see all those men jostling for space to pull down a Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh while it is fellow women like Gita Mukherjee, Mamta Banerjee and Jayanthi Natarajan who are fighting to keep her in office? Don't you know, Jayalalitha was in power through five long years -- it was longer for her subject -- only because Sasikala Natarajan was out there to prop her up and her cutouts, alike?

Why, what about Mamta Banerjee herself? Haven't you seen all those women MPs rushing to her side, every time she manages to get beaten up by Jyoti Basu's police in native West Bengal?

It's an all-man world, still. You cannot blame Indira Gandhi if her home minister, K Brahmananda Reddy, happened to be a man, and also happened to harass the likes of Vijayaraje Scindia and Gayatri Devi in the prisons of the Emergency? It was thus Om Mehta's mistake that the two women from erstwhile royalties held a political view that was not comfortable to Indira Gandhi's continuance in office.

You spare a minute, and you will recall how the entire menfolk conspired to have Indira Gandhi out of power, just because some judge somewhere gave some verdict, the sum total of which meant that she had won her election through corrupt practices -- a men's preserve, did you say? -- and thus could not continue in power. Recall the Nagarwala episode, the Kuo oil deal, suppression of judges, why even the very election of V V Giri as President of India and the consequent vertical split in the Congress party, and you will know how all the male foggies of the nation were coming in the way of women's upliftment.

So what if it meant the upliftment of a single woman? Didn't she, through her years in office, uplift all the women in the nation, and placed them where they are now, and from where they need only a third of all seats, not half of them, to even out with men?

If Indira Gandhi is here, can Sonia Gandhi be far away? Ask Maneka Gandhi, and she will tell you all that's needed to be known about a woman. How all the men in the Congress party and outside wanted only Rajiv Gandhi to take the political torch from her departed husband, and how they all did conspire to throw her out of Indira Gandhi's prime ministerial home.

If they did succeed, it's they and they alone who are to be blamed. After all Indira Gandhi too was a helpless, hapless woman like Menaka, and what could have an older, grieving woman have done in the face of unmanly behaviour by all the men around her? Again, was it not a male, an election commissioner at that, who conspired with other men to have the by-election for the Lok Sabha seat, from where Sanjay Gandhi was earlier elected, held before Maneka was 25 -- the eligible age for contesting elections?

And what did you expect a prime minister in the pre-Seshan days to do? To dictate terms like a mother-in-law? But then, Indira Gandhi was no dictator, nor was she mother-in-law material. She was Amma to one, and Amma to all.

Think, that way, about a woman who would lead all other women out of their bondage and sufferings? If Sonia Gandhi's image comes to your mind, it's but natural. If it is Sushma Swaraj, Mayawati or Jayalalitha that you think of, then you better get your facts and figures checked. Leave out Mamta Banerjee from the list, so do, leave out Geeta Mukherjee and Sadhvi Uma Bharati. The first two are rebels, and are interested in it only in the interest of other, and the last one is after all a sanyasin, and has renounced the world long before entering politics, and entering the Lok Sabha.

It should be Sonia Gandhi's world that would be evolving if and when women get their rights recognised by the men who rule India. Thirtythree per cent is too small compensation when you consider that half of the nation's population comprises eves as you are told, but even this small figure is big enough to upset the political equations of years.

Where political ideologies have crumpled, where electoral issues are found wanting, and where all-embracing charismatic personalities are a thing of the past, it is the collective might of the women that would save the nation just as the collective might of the BCs and OBCs is doing now. It has, after all been a woman's traditional duty, to keep her home and keep it in order. Our women politicians, under the circumstances, are not the ones to throw in the towel and run away from their responsibilities.

No, all this does not mean that Sonia Gandhi needs power, and needs the Congress party's organisation. If anything, it is the other way round. It's the Congress that's after her, in the absence of anything else to market the party. It's the government that is after her -- that she should govern it.

The BJP may breathe easy that Sonia is no Indira, even when Indira meant India. But Sonia is a Nehru-Gandhi, so was Indira. Women of the world can then unite, and Sonia cannot be blamed if the men of her times push her to the wall, just as their counterparts had done with Indira Gandhi.

Then you should not blame Sonia Gandhi if fellow-women like a Mayawati here, and a Jayalalitha there, not to mention the already-forgotten Lakshmi Sivaparvathi, decide to fight her battle in her company. Who would then say, women would not launch a thousand ships themselves? Who would then say, Sharad Yadav and Banatwala are after all right whatever be their intentions?

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