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This paper offers a window into the world of political women, but from a segment that rarely makes news – the world of urban local politics inhabited by corporators and councillors. For reasons that are easy to understand, political decentralisation in India has been associated with the revival of the panchayat system of local self-government (made into law through the 73rd Amendment in 1993) to the point of being practically synonymous with it.1 A considerable amount of interest has been generated in this revival, and especially in the provision of a onethird reservation for women within panchayati raj institutions (PRIs). Campaigns and debates on 33 per cent reservations for women have evolved in two phases. The first was concerned with the degrees of success as well as the obstacles faced by women in entering the system of decentralised government (once again, concentrating on the rural system from village to district). The second phase, from 1996 onwards, focused on the pros and cons of introducing similar reservations in the state assem blies and in Parliament (first tabled as the 81st Amendment Bill). This is now rather well known as a decade long campaign which has been unable even to have the issue debated in Parliament.

In sharp contrast to the public attention devoted to the Women’s Reservations Bill and the entry of women into the PRIs, the urban twin of the 73rd Amendment – passed almost simultaneously as the 74th Amendment or the Nagarpalika Act of June 1993 – remains largely unknown. Very few are aware that the Nagarpalika Act seeks to restructure the municipal system, and includes a provision that reserves for women one-third of all seats in all urban local bodies from small towns to metropolitan cities. The point of departure of this paper is, therefore, the comparative neglect of the urban situation in contemporary activism and scholarship, whether this be in discussions concerning local governance or the role of women in politics. The paper draws on the experiences and findings of a preliminary study on municipal governance in two cities. The larger study looks into the social and political backgrounds of municipal councillors, both men and women, across class, caste and community, and elicits their opinions on a range of issues pertaining to the functioning of the municipal system, and the role of reservations within it. The views of the voting public were also a part of the study, in order to explore what impact and knowledge of the municipal system existed on the ground.

My aim in this paper is to open up for further discussion two issues that have underwritten more general concerns about women’s political participation. The first of these is the problem of the so-called “proxy” women, i e, women who are stand-ins for male relatives, usually politician husbands. The existing scheme of reservations and the rotation of reserved seats over successive elections, it has been said, encourage the election of such proxies, whose presence thus vitiates the basis of reservations for women. The second, related question concerns the very rationale behind women’s reservations, namely, the need to have a critical mass of women in the political arena. While the first issue has been clearly identified as a negative drawback by feminists and political analysts, the second has been more or less assumed to be the positive ground for reservations and has not been subjected to much scrutiny. Our own study, however, muddies the waters considerably on both these issues. I will argue that the proxy problem is far more complex than what existing critiques would allow. On the other hand, it cannot be simply asserted that women in bodies such as the municipal corporations of our major cities constitute, in themselves, a political identity or a distinct force. Indeed, as we shall see, the subject of women in power – at least in the world of urban local politics – turns out to be quite an intractable one, and raises many new questions for feminism and the women’s movement.

Before moving any further into these extremely important issues, it is necessary to provide some brief background. The study is based on two municipal corporations – the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the Bangalore City Corporation (BCC), and was conducted during 2002-03. At the time of the study, the MCD (which covers most of Delhi, barring the small cantonment areas and the central district covered by the New Delhi Municipal Council) was administering a population of over 13 million people. This was spread across an area covering 1,400 square kilometres, and was composed of 134 wards, created by dividing Delhi’s 67 assembly constituencies into two parts.2 The city of Bangalore on the other hand, was about half the size of Delhi, with a population of about six million spread across 225 square kilometres, divided into 100 wards among the 15 assembly seats, all administered by the BCC.

Delhi and Bangalore present a picture of contrasts in more ways than one. A particularly significant aspect for our purposes here concerns the pattern of reserving wards in both cities. Reservations create a set of categories based on interlocking conside rations of gender and caste. In Delhi’s MCD, a total of 25 wards were reserved for scheduled castes, while the remaining were marked “general”. Within this overall structure, one-third of all the wards were reserved for women, producing a final pattern of nine reserved seats for dalit women (SCW), 16 for dalits (SC), 37 for women (W) and 72 general seats. The distribution was mechanically generated and made public in the Delhi gazette as early as 1994, and was to be in force for the next five elections. In preparation for the first elections (which were held in 1997), every third ward was marked for women, every sixth as SC, and so on, and elections were held accordingly, with no woman standing from a general seat. (According to the system of rotation, the existing one-third seats would be de- reserved – i e, become general seats in the next elections – and another set of one-third seats reserved, and so on, in a cyclical fashion.) However, just before the next elections were to be held in 2002, the BJP government then in power in Delhi state managed to freeze rotations (even though this was strictly speaking illegal), thus maintaining the existing pattern and location of reserved wards for all groups. The overall picture has been summarised in Table 1. (The table includes the break-up of winning candidates for the two elections of 1997 and 2002 by political party.)

The BCC presents a remarkably different picture. As a consequence of its history of backward caste mobilisation, the state of Karnataka also has reservations for the backward castes (BC) along with scheduled castes (SC) and women. The BC quota is further sub-divided among two sub-groups: while the BC(A) cate gory includes the entire range of BCs from vokkaligas to yadavas, kurubas, gollas, banajigas as well as backward caste Muslims, the smaller BC(B) category includes intermediate castes such as vokkaligas/gowdas and reddys, coupled with an income criterion. Each of these categories in turn had one-third seats reserved for women, adding up to a total of 35 seats. Thus, in the BCC, one-third of the 100 seats were reserved for BCs (27 BC (A) and 6 BC (B)), 14 seats for dalits, while the remaining 53 were general. The overall distribution of castes has been presented for the two elections of 1996 and 2001 (with a break-up of corporators according to political party) in Table 2. Unlike Delhi, rotation did take place in Bangalore, and for all seats. While the selection of SC wards was determined according to the proportion of SCs in the population of the ward, as far as BCs and women were concerned, it appeared that the absence of demographic data (for BCs) or any mechanical criterion (as in the case of Delhi) resulted in a situation of some arbitrariness. Thus, which wards became reserved and for whom at election time was open to some manipulation, with the ruling party of the time using this to their advantage.

Since it was not possible to interview all councillors, Table 3 gives the gender, caste and community break-up of our sample in each city, totalling 75 in Delhi and 59 in Bangalore.

Beyond ensuring that more than 50 per cent were women, and that all reserved categories were represented in our sample, councillors were randomly selected from different wards. In the case of Bangalore, the figures in brackets indicate the reserved wards selected in our sample – i e, three wards reserved for SC women, five for SCs, seven for BC(A) women, seven for BC(A), three for BC(B) women, two for BC, 19 women and 12 general wards. But, as we discovered along the way, the general category showed greater caste diversity than we had initially anticipated. Thus, our sample included six SC male councillors, one of whom won from a general seat. The num ber of backward caste councillors, both men and women,

Table 1: Results of 1997, 2002 Municipal Corporation Elections in Delhi by Category of Seats

don’t drag us women into it”. She went on to tell us how much she missed her children. However, as it turns out, these were the rare cases.

Among those in Bangalore who did not stand again when the ward was dereserved for women, including among both scheduled castes and backward castes, we were often given a different version. We were told by women councillors, often with great poignancy, that it had been their husband’s lifelong ambition to stand for election, so how could they prevent them from doing so when the ward was dereserved and made an open seat in the next election? Thus, far from being motivated by a lack of interest or of ability in politics, the withdrawal of such women from elections pointed to the dilemmas they were faced with sharing political opportunities within the family.

In another case, the wife of a Janata Dal worker (a gowda running a small shop) who had been made to stand in a true proxy fashion in 1996, actually stood again when the ward was dereserved five years later, but then lost to the (male) Congress candidate. In yet another interview with a Reddy ex-councillor, the husband, (who was not a politician himself and sat in on the discussions), proclaimed that he was fully in favour of reservations for women, because, in his words “you get two for the price of one”! (While she attended council meetings, he helped supervise development work in the ward.) We see here a clear repudiation of the zero sum approach presupposed by the proxy argument, presented in the form of an alternative, nuanced perspective on how political work may be shared between men and women.

Yet another perspective is provided by the only woman corporator in Bangalore to win again from an open seat in 2001. (She had contested the 1996 election in a BC(A) women’s ward as an independent candidate.) Claiming that she started out with absolutely no interest in politics, this seasoned corporator now preferred to work on her own, in spite of family responsibilities. Her husband played no part in her political life, she said emphatically, not even to accompany her on her rounds. Interestingly, one of the strongest criticisms of the proxy came from a widow, who contested but lost in 1996 from a neighbouring ward reserved for women, and in 2001 stood successfully from her own ward which was reserved for BC(B) women. With 10 years of political experience behind her, she spoke at length about the difficulties of the work involved, the interference of rival male politicians, and the need for capable women; even reservations were but a “pretence of equality”.4 Compare this stand with that of the only ST corporator, who, while acknowledging that she owed her entry into politics to her husband, placed far greater emphasis on the enabling role of reservations. She was disturbed, she said, by the frequent talk (by men) of trying to scrap reservations for women. She was very clear that she would have made no headway in local politics without reservations. There was such a strong caste hierarchy in the municipality that she feels she would have been kept out of any standing committee, but for the fact that the Social Justice Committee was reserved for SC/ST.

The proxy then, turns out to be a complex rather than a straightforward phenomenon, open to varying degrees of negotiation once the classic housewife relationship has been destabilised through accession to the public post of a corporator. At the very least, the real life instances cited above make it evident that there are a number of shortcomings in existing critiques of the proxy.

A common assumption has been that such women would be passive place-holders for their men – but instead, a whole spectrum of possibilities emerged. There were, no doubt, the few who remained victim figures throughout their term. But there were many more women who developed in different ways in the course of five years in office, some becoming significant political players in their own right.

Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that the housewife is – or ought to be – an important figure for a feminist politics. Rather than offering premature condemnation, feminists should be trying to understand the process that is engendered when such a person gains a modicum of power within the system. This does not imply, of course, that such women be privileged at the expense of others, but to insist that the problem needs to be posed very differently. This is especially true in the world of politics, which is all about having the “right connections”, including familial ones. We need to pay more attention to what happens after women gain entry – especially women from the backward and scheduled castes.

We now come to the more difficult questions. In what ways do “women” emerge as a subject within the field of local urban politics? Before getting further into our study, let us look at some recent considerations. In the context of a parallel study of women’s reservations in urban metropolitan India, Stephanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (2000) has presented some of the main arguments that support women’s reservations. These include – considerations of gender justice (women’s political presence should be proportional to their presence in society); arguments focusing on women’s interests (a sizeable presence of women is necessary for their interests to be adequately represented); and a resource argument (women have specific qualities that ought to be part of political life). From a very different perspective, Nivedita Menon (2000) has critiqued the very notion of the category of “women” in debates over the Women’s Reservation Bill. Her argument is that it is necessary to go beyond quotas (which are but the

Notes: Figures in brackets indicate number of reserved wards selected in the sample for the relevant category (including the ‘general’ category). However, in Bangalore, many reserved category candidates contested from the ‘general’ category wards – hence among women, only 3 of the 19 selected from the general-women wards were upper caste, and among men, only 3 of the 12 selected from general-all wards were upper caste men.

All councillors were initially asked an open-ended question about any experiences of constraints in carrying out their work. Interestingly, at this general level councillors only brought up problems related to the functioning of the municipality – neither gender, caste nor minority issues came up. Instead, they voiced constraints created by administrative interference and the functioning of municipal officials, lack of financial power, corruption and so on. If control by others was a problem, this took the most frequent form of interference by the local MLAs, especially in Delhi.

What happens when the focus of the question of constraints is specifically turned onto experiences of disadvantage? In order to probe further, all interviewees were asked a series of questions that sought to determine the presence of discrimination, whether in their work and interaction with colleagues and officials, in the kinds of responsibilities entrusted to them, as well as in relation to their families. Only some spoke up on these issues, whether on their own behalf or for others, with significant numbers in both cities denying the importance or relevance of discrimination in their lives as corporators. This is by no means an easy issue to interpret. Are we dealing with the genuine absence of such experiences for most people, or is it that such experiences are disavowed and denied? We obviously cannot say for certain, but then, this problem is by no means unique for this kind of question, since it structures to varying degrees all the responses received in the interviews.

To put this differently, methodologically speaking, we cannot be overly concerned with determining just what the councillors might be holding back (a matter that came up earlier in discussing degrees of “political correctness” on the subject of reservations); we must lay greater stress on comparing what they do say in the course of a structured interview. In Delhi, for instance, only six women spoke up on the issue of public discrimination, such as being given smaller jobs, being removed from responsible posts, or being harassed. Others said that, regardless of their own social status, what mattered was having a godfather; that women were as guilty of pulling each other down; or that too much power was vested in the ruling party. Yet others said that colleagues, male or female, were of little consequence, one just had to get the work done, especially with the cooperation of officials. It is particularly telling that the dalit women councillors in Delhi were the least forthcoming on the subject, with the exception of the sole representative of the BSP, a newcomer. Among dalit men in Delhi, three spoke out about caste biases among colleagues and bureaucrats. One said that “they want bonded SC members who would be like a pet dog”, and another that he was humiliated by never being given an important post.

The one question in Delhi that elicited the largest number of positive responses (from practically 50 per cent of women councillors) was the role of family responsibilities and constraints from family members. “Home life is finished!” declared two newly elected upper caste women councillors. Women spoke about disturbances caused by the intrusion of corporation issues, lack of attention to family matters, or that daughters and husbands needed to help them, whether at home or at work. Never speaking in the first person, a number of women (and men) said that the husbands of younger women were jealous of their wives’ movements, especially among strangers, and reported cases of separation due to lack of support and understanding. Much depen ded on how family members handled the situation – one dalit woman councillor said that a new division of labour was required within the family. While it is clear, therefore, that the sphere of the home elicited far more than the public sphere of work insofar as issues were frequently acknowledged and dwelt upon, barring some exceptions they did not appear as major obstacles either. It should also be remembered that the remaining 50 per cent claimed they faced no difficulties in carrying out their tasks as councillors – husbands were cooperative, cooking was taken over by others, children adjusted. In conducting interviews we discovered that while women frequently turned the front rooms of homes into offices to maintain a continuum between home and work, men had separate offices located in market areas.

In Bangalore, on the other hand, proportionately more women talked about the problems they faced in their public lives, sometimes in the first person (“when we speak we are simply not heard by the officials, we have to learn how to become loud and aggressive”), but more frequently, adopting a third person position, referring to what certain other women, whom they sometimes mentioned by name, had suffered. A common refrain was that new women corporators in particular were discriminated against and that only experienced women counted. A small number of women and men emphasised that husbands could be a problem – their jealousies (one particularly goodlooking woman corporator was practically stalked by her husband and never allowed out of eyesight), their manipulation of their wives, and their desire to be in control. This lack of freedom was occasionally turned into a reason as to why reservations for women were pointless if not counterproductive.

Two Muslim women corporators in Bangalore, as it turned out, had much to say on the subject of discrimination. One of them, who had stood successfully since 1990 from a Muslim populated ward every time it was reserved for women, and was now councillor for the third time, claimed that male domination was rampant, especially in her community. Not only did muslim leaders attempt to scuttle reservations for women in her ward, but even women did not find it easy to accept women leaders. The other, a teacher and a newcomer to politics, spoke of the advantages of being unmarried – not only had she faced opposition from party members and ward members, but even her own brother-in-law attempted to wrest control and harassed her repeatedly – she was only able to talk about this when the interview was officially concluded.

Given all that has been said so far, it is perhaps not surprising that when we posed the question whether reserved candidates were able to constitute a group or force within the corporation, this was overwhelmingly answered in the negative. An important assumption has been the “critical mass” theory, namely that the presence of a minimum of one-third women in political bodies would make a significant difference towards influencing proceedings, instead of a few token women having to act in isolation. However, if the experience of local urban government is anything to go by, then this concept is not working, at least not directly. In fact, when the question of acting as a group was posed to the councillors, many of them did not even understand what we meant.

Clearly, the world of urban politics offers numerous challenges and no easy points of entry. However, it is important to resist middle class conceptions – also stoked by NGOs and hyped by the media – of politics as essentially corrupt and dirty. For such conceptions are frequently expressions of the frustration of powerful people whose power is not working. Instead, the presence of reservations based on caste and gender in our municipalities needs to be turned into an opportunity. Councillors and corporators occupy little understood positions within a dense network that ranges from “the politics of the governed” [Chatterjee 2004] at the margins of the metropolis to the new dispensers of governance via mega projects and public-private partnerships. More sustained interactions with this world over a longer period of time – through ethnographies of municipal life, for instance – are sure to yield deep insights into the everyday exclusions, conflicts and forms of empowerment that constitute democratic political processes and their effects on people’s lives. As I have argued above, the challenge lies precisely in learning how to make the subject of women and feminism meaningful within contexts already defined by politics and power. After all, those supporting the demand for similar reservations at the state and national levels can ill afford to hold on to illusory notions of “women” as a social or political identity. The problems and possibilities of “women” within the politics of urban local governance thus deserve much more space than we have granted them so far.

EPW

Email: maryj@cwds.ac.in

Notes

272.

References

Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 20 (10), May 1.