Book review: Shirin M. Rai and Carole Spary,Performing Representation: Women Members in Indian Parliament

The general elections of 2019 in India were the world’s largest democratic exercise, which invited close scrutiny. Among the most hyped positive takeaways from the elections was that the 17th Lok Sabha would have the distinction of the highest percentage of women members of parliament (MPs) since independence. Their number stood at 78, constituting 14 per cent of the total membership, evidencing the trend of slow yet steady growth in representation over the years. The outgoing Lok Sabha had 11 per cent women MPs, while the first Lok Sabha of 1952 had a miniscule 5 per cent. A third of these 78 MPs retained their seats. They were also, in terms of averages, younger, more educated, richer and won by bigger margins than their male counterparts. An analysis of the strike rates—the percentage of seats contested that are won—showed that women scored higher in parties that fielded a noteworthy number of women.

It is in this deceptively heartening context that Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament assumes added salience. It brings home again a stark unpalatable reality, only too well known by now. Highest representation to date is in actuality, disappointingly enough, not something to be particularly euphoric about. As has been highlighted by the authors, India ranks an unimpressive 145 out of 193 in the Inter Parliamentary Union’s league table for women’s representation in parliaments (as in December 2017). Carole Spary scathingly pointed out in an interview to a national daily, ‘78 female MPs is good, but it will take another 40 years to reach 33 percent’, as promised in the Women’s Reservation Bill, comatose for the last two decades. A comparison of the latest data on national parliaments available with the World Bank shows that India is still way behind the world as well as the regional average, which are 24 per cent and 18 per cent respectively.

Excelling in the numbers game remains elusive for India. Unfortunately, the politics of recognition through a restricted identity, rather than a politics of redistribution of economic and social power, has tended to tenaciously, and tediously, dominate the gender empowerment narrative. Apparently, with a view to bring the narrative on to a more meaningful track, the authors have positioned their work to look beyond numbers, although not downplaying their crucial part. As accurately stated by them, in spite of being the most significant and vibrant democracy globally, there is very little literature on the Indian Parliament and much less on the role of the abysmally low numbers of women MPs. While there is a huge feminist literature on gender and representation, affirmative action being universally accepted as the fast track to assured equality, overlooking processes through which democratic practice takes shape has been a serious limitation to our understanding of representative politics. It is this void in democratic theory that is sought to be fixed. The searing question often left unasked about how representative in the Parliament as a gendered institution is raised alongside through a performative approach, sidestepping a neat, parsimonious explanatory model. An innovative framework with two axes for assessing performing representation is introduced. The first brings into view the body, space, voice and labour together with their intersectionality. The second allows for an analysis of issues of authenticity of representative performance, mode of representation, representative liminality and resistance to representation. These are woven with tried and tested methodologies of narrative research, ethnographic literature and mainstream and feminist theories of representation to achieve a more nuanced understanding.

Through nine chapters, the plea of Performing Representation: Women Members in Indian Parliament is to see parliamentary politics for what it is: a limited, but critically important performance of politics, where women MPs play their roles through participating in its deliberations, law-making, ceremonies and rituals. In so doing, they reproduce dominant forms of gendered power relations, while at the same time challenge them. This complicated picture does not lead to a utopian projection of women MPs. However, it attempts to reaffirm the postulate that more women (a critical mass) and more feminist women (collective critical actors of a different kind) are needed. The endeavour is, in the long run, to enable and strengthen the pursuit of a markedly progressive gendered agenda both inside and outside the Parliament, as a dialectic of accountability and solidarity needs to play out successfully in Indian politics.

For a reader, the expectations from the detailed contents are therefore understandably high. However, they do not adequately measure up to the note of hyper-promise that is liberally lathered over the book. One of the likely reasons could be the elongated period of research covering different time slabs. Rai conducted a study of 23 women MPs over a 10-year period in the 10th and 14th Lok Sabhas, and Spary interviewed women and men MPs between 2009 and 2016. A definitive impression comes through that the basic structuring and related piecing together of findings were dependent more on what could be readily accessed from hassle-free, available sources. Issues, personalities and dates keep colliding in a tousled skein and do not lend themselves convincingly to the much-touted performative framework.

Staying with the performance quotient, while it is acknowledged that diminished collective history of the contribution of women MPs adversely impacts their memorialization, there is no effort made to spotlight members from across the ideological spectrum who have left their mark on our parliamentary history. It is claimed that Spary specifically researched the election and role of the first woman Speaker, Meira Kumar. The latter aspect, which would have been a winning value-add for the book, is barely alluded to. Similarly, Sumitra Mahajan, the successor woman Speaker, features sporadically. Nowhere is their performance as the constitutionally mandated custodians of the powers and responsibilities of the Lok Sabha critiqued. Mahajan’s recall-worthy quote, ‘halla was most during my time…’, referring to the unending disruptions of House proceedings under her watch, deserved attention. Both the Speakers had served multiple terms as MPs, yet they did not cover themselves with glory. On a positive note, going back in time, Najma Heptullah, the longest serving Deputy Chairperson of the Rajya Sabha and the lone Indian President of the Inter Parliamentary Union, would have made a compelling study. Instead, she just pops up in a list of the likes of long time women MPs like Vijaya Raje Scindia, Mamata Banerjee, Maneka Gandhi, and so on. Inadvertently, or otherwise, the authors have in fact reinforced the routine anonymization of women MPs. By discussing them merely as a number, twinning them with the dates of their interviews with the authors through various chapters, and that too in brackets, their profile and stature stand greatly dimmed. The historical context, as a starter, does not build up an appetite for what is to follow and is, in that sense, largely superfluous. It could again be put down to being an easy cut–paste task.

What are portrayed as challenges of getting nominated by political parties, contesting elections, getting time and opportunities to participate in debates in the House are already known and do not throw dazzling light through an enhanced gender-illuminated lens. House rules and how political parties play them—embedded in social hierarchies and rigid infirmities—are the essential determinants in these matters, and it is obvious that gendered structures and institutions will respond in an utterly predictable manner. The accounts of the debates in the 14th Lok Sabha and women’s participation in them do not provide any new insights other than some statistical aggregation, which one could have had access to anyway from the primary sources. Again, the MPLADS information overload is more of a stretch to attempt to make a point about gender politics of distribution of resources. Does not quite wash.

Further, it would have been academically riveting to have an in-depth examination of the travails of the Women’s Reservation Bill as it keeps flitting in and out of the layered chapters. An avoidable gap as it is, on date, regarded as the panacea for gender disempowerment. Interestingly, the Constituent Assembly did not favour reservations. Unravelling the swing of the pendulum is undeniably complex and essential an exercise, especially as the authors are sanguine that the Bill may be passed in the future.

That said, the unmistakable conclusion about the Parliamentary Committee for the Empowerment of Women being a colossal flop is welcome. Hopefully, it will be taken note of and consigned to the trash bin of useless symbolisms. All in all, a worthwhile, gentle, albeit at times, fuzzy, wake-up call to the enormous tasks ahead, both in terms of scholarship and socio-political reinvention.