When women did not want a quota

Why did the women members of the Constituent Assembly (CA) reject reservations for women? There’s no easy answer, and scholars such as Mary John and Forbes offer competing explanations but there’s perhaps more research waiting to be done.

When it came to reserving parliamentary seats for women, the Constituent Assembly (CA) was consistent from start to finish: no reservation of seats for women, please. All the women in the CA argued in support of this stand at different points of time during the three years it functioned.

Hansa Mehta, in December 1946, proudly noted that she was part of a women’s organisation (All-India Women’s Conference) that never sought reservation of seats for women. In July 1947, Renuka Ray delivered a stirring speech arguing why women do not want or need reservations in the political arena and that they wished to compete as equals. In October 1949, Purnima Banerji reiterated that Indian women did not want seats reserved for them in Parliament.

We know that the CA changed its mind about reservations for minorities and that there were divisions among minority members of the CA on whether there should be such reservations. The consistency, unanimity and vehemence with which women in the CA refused reservations stands out. While Partition was one explanation why there are no reservations for minorities, to understand the CA’s position on women’s reservation, we have to go further back in history.

Beginning in the early 20th century, Indian women started organising and agitating for the right to vote and the right to get elected to legislatures which the British were setting up for Indian provinces.

Indian women later came out in large numbers to be part of the freedom movement. Connecting the freedom movement to women’s liberation, the women’s movements wanted space in politics to effectively advocate their concerns and needs as Indian women. They coordinated and collaborated with English suffragettes who had long been campaigning for the right to vote in England. They did so in the hope that when democracy came to India, they would not just be able to vote as equals but also could stand for and win elections.

However, on reservations for women, there was initially no unanimity on whether it was needed. Of the three Indian women in the Second Round Table Conference, two (Sarojini Naidu and Begum Shah Nawaz) were opposed to reservations for women, whereas Radhabai Subbarayan was in favour of it. This division in the women’s movement is well documented and described in an essay in Geraldine Forbes’ book, Women in Colonial India: Essays on Politics, Medicine and Historiography.

There was no such disagreement between the three women (Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Muthulakshmi Reddi and Begum Hamid Ali) who later went to London to argue against women’s reservations before the Joint Select Committee of the British Parliament. This Committee had been set-up to advise the British Parliament on the Government of India Act, 1935. The three argued that there should be no reservations for women. However, their views were ignored and the GoI Act reserved seats for women in the provincial and central legislatures that were set-up under the GoI Act. Since the GoI Act followed a system of separate electorates for each community, the seats reserved for women were split between these communities.

Renuka Ray, speaking in the CA, criticised this reservation system in the GOI Act, 1935, as something which had created further differences within the women’s movement in India. In contrast, when the Constitution of India was being framed, the women’s movement got their wish as the Constitution stayed silent on women’s reservation in legislatures.

Why did the women members of the CA reject reservations for women? There’s no easy answer, and scholars such as Mary John and Forbes offer competing explanations but there’s perhaps more research waiting to be done to understand this. This topic has sprung back into relevance in the last few decades as the demand for women’s reservation gathered momentum and the 106th Constitutional Amendment Act was passed in 2023.

Does this necessarily mean that reservations for women today are against the constitutional vision of equality? Probably not. From political parties refusing to give tickets to women finding it difficult to raise funds to campaign, women candidates face more hurdles than men in elections. Given this, the ‘founding mothers’ would have perhaps accepted their daughters’ wisdom in demanding and securing reservations for women.