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CONTENTS Editorials • Message from the Director - Prof. Shagufa Kapadia ................................................................. 3 • Message from the Guest Editor - Aparna Vijayan...................................................................... 4 Spotlight • UN Women’s Leadership and Political Participation................................................................. 6 Perspectives 1. Understanding the Dialectics of ‘Change’ – Antara Chakrabarty .............................................. 7 2. Women in State of War – Fiona Dias......................................................................................... 8 Contributions 1. Women in Politics and Women Empowerment – Divya Vasava ............................................... 9 2. Women’s Representation in Indian Legislatures after Emergency 1975-77 – Krishna Mishra ........................................................................... 12 3. Women Politicians since 1975 – a Bollywood Way – Nalanda Tambe ................................... 17 4. Women in Politics – Nimisha Amit Mishra ............................................................................. 19 5. Women in Politics: Representation and Empowerment – Parvin Sultana ............................... 21 6. Declivity of Women – is it Politically “Correct” – Shikha Sharma ......................................... 24 Book Review • The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India – Nidhi Shendunikar–Tere ..... 26 Current Statistics • Political Participation and Indian Women – Raakhee Suryaprakash ....................................... 28 Insight • Reimagining Politics of Gender: Legacy of Dr. Sharmila Rege – Rahul Mane....................... 32 • drlgp A_¡ fpS>L$pfZ - rkÝ^p’® drZepf..................................................................................... 35 Bibliography 37 WSRC News • Activity Report .......................................................................................................................... 38 • New Arrivals - Documentation Center ...................................................................................... 41 Quotable Quotes 44 Guest Editor Aparna Vijayan Freelancer M.A. (Political Science) The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda Hon. Director Prof. Shagufa Kapadia Professor Department of Human Development and Family Studies Faculty of Family and Community Sciences The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda Publication Co-ordination Geetha Srinivasan Library Assistant Women’s Studies Research Center The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda Khushbu Suthar Program Officer Women’s Studies Research Center The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda Message from the Director Greetings from the Women’s Studies Research Center! “In a gentle way you can shake the world,” Mohandas Karamdas Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi was successful in mobilizing women to enter into politics and in fact believed that women’s participation in politics is imperative and inevitable. For Gandhiji women’s emancipation was an integral part of the goal of svaräj, which for him represented both personal autonomy and religious and political freedom. By urging women to step out of their domestic spheres, he helped them find a new dignity and place in public life, a new confidence, and a new self-view that they could themselves act against oppression. From passive objects, women could become active subjects or agents of reform, not only of their own predicament but of the whole society. In bringing out this issue on Gender and Politics, the Women’s Studies Research Center draws attention to the current scenario of women’s representation and participation in politics and leadership roles, and the gender issues therein. I thank the guest editor AparnaVijayan and all the authors for their contribution to this significant theme. Shagufa Kapadia, PhD Honorary Director, WSRC Professor of Human Development 3 Message from the Guest Editor The term gender refers to the socio-cultural constructs of values, behaviors and attitudes associated with the different sexed categories such as men, women and the third gender. Rising above the physiological characteristics, these socio-cultural values attributed to them on the basis of their perfomativity constitute the term, gender. To comprehend gender and the roles it play is significant through a gendered lens as far as the analysis of various social, cultural, political and economic machineries in society function. Placing gender in the analysis of these conventional societal constructs has become inevitable in order to not just understand how deftly it destabilizes the stability of our mainstream discourses, but also to know how the marginalized sections (be it of any gender) are perceived in a broader social perspective seeking to address their justice concerns. Now talking about the term politics: The dominant self enters into a perennially conflicting relationship with the other and strives to maintain or ‘secure’ this relational hierarchy; which is made instrumental using the state and the non-state machineries. The domain of politics encompasses the public as well as the private spheres and juxtaposes socio-cultural and economic environments under its direct or indirect influence. It forms the substance, the essence and one of the dynamic forces by which the society, economy, culture and other physical and meta-physical entities get strongly influenced by, if not, just be dependent on. With such a description of politics, it is evident how all these entities remain in constant flux and function with dynamicity. Inherent in such a power-philic struggle-laden structure, the questions regarding marginalization, subjugation, justice, order, profit, identity and violence emerge out and present a latent picture of the indelible imprints these concerns leave on the society, especially on the sections finding themselves at the receiving end of this struggle. One such section constitutes women, the third gender, the effeminate men and the like who are crucified by the stereotypical framework of the society on the lines of ‘gender’. This is why, to comprehend the International System, International Relations, State Politics, and the entire chain of epistemology and ontology guiding political studies, gender becomes one of the lenses. Viewing these segments using gender as the lens give us an idea on the extent, magnitude, the gravity and the intensity with which a political relationship conveniently invades the social, cultural, economic and other spheres to decapacitate the already justice-deprived ones. Gender, a political category in itself, is thus, studied with a skewed understanding or deliberately left unnoticed to suit conveniently the needs for rights and justice. Politicization of gender has seemed to inordinately create the need for radical changes without allowing them to happen. One of the major causes leading to such an epistemological paradoxicity is the inherent threat lying within the mainstream political discourse, which gets threatened due to its analysis keeping gender as the foreground. The mainstream political discourse which is silent on sexuality, sexual rights and gender has largely been concocted by the imbalances associated with gender in a number of ways, creating lesser chances of claiming justice from the state. Right from participation to representation and now, empowerment, the discourse related to gender has been laden with lot of socio-cultural biases. One rarely includes third gender, in discourses, leave aside inclusion of provisions for them in the legal system. There has been sexualization of the deprived groups, which strips them of any moral claims to ‘substantive’ welfare. This indicates the heightening of actual denial of rights said in constitution and denial of receiving justice; as a major mode of social exclusion. The implications of the liberating potential of such rights, once 4 their meaning is fixed by law, becomes always problematic because of its predilection towards certainty and exactitude. The mainstream politics strengthens this singularly universal law (read measures adopted like instituting the women’s reservation bill) whose discourse is predicated upon the assumption that justice can be attained once and for all by fixing identities, categorizing them and adopting a distorted approach of protectionism or mobilizing greater differentiation by doing that. Nevertheless such a bill, as argued by many, at least helps making cosmetic changes within the system as far as providing opportunities to deprived categories are concerned. Equality, for instance, might be explicitly enshrined in the Indian constitution, but Indian women’s, third gender’s and effeminate men’s and all those stereotypically subsumed categories’ lives continue to remain characterized by pervasive discrimination due the wide lacunae generated between ‘formal equality’ and ‘substantive equality’ that plagues justice. Here’s an attempt at realizing that it is precarious to address both ‘equality’ and ‘gender differences’ following both these equality models , because, any attempt at correcting the fallacies embedded in the social fabric is thwarted by a rigid conception of the bills and laws and a closed social conditioning. I sincerely thank Prof. Dr. Shagufa Kapadia for having recognized the need to raise this issue of gender and sexuality, in order to understand how the existing political framework addresses, or fails to address it, especially in the light of violence and regressive attitude

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