A Dazzling the World: A Study of India's Constitutional Amendment Mandating Reservations for Women on Rurual Panchayats

Abstract

In 1993, India launched a radical political experiment designed to transform the lives of women at the grassroots level: it constitutionally mandated the creation of village governing bodies known as panchayats, with at least one-third of all seats reserved for women. The women of rural India had been excluded from participation in the political arena altogether, the result of centuries of social and economic inequality and subordination by their fathers, their husbands, and their sons. This bold mandate by the world's largest democracy was a deliberate attempt to empower some of the weakest members of Indian society. What the authors have learned about the results of constitutionally mandating one-third of the seats on rural panchayats for women is quite remarkable.The article is divided into four sections. Section I describes the status of women in India, starting with the traditional role of women in Indian society prescribed by the Hindu tradition. It also looks at how the colonial legal infrastructure affected the lives of Indian women. Section I ends by describing the guarantees of gender justice built into the Indian Constitution, expressed in terms of equality and dignity, and analyzes the extent to which the lives of women in India have changed in the post-Independence era. Section II tackles the subject of panchayats, starting with a history of caste panchayats, progressing to the post-Independence panchayats, and concluding with the recently constitutionally mandated panchayats. Section III explores the effects of mandatory reservation for women on rural panchayats, presenting an array of empirical data from various states in India. The authors conclude, in Section IV, with personal narratives about their field research in villages in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh.