Women in Politics and the Subject of Reservations

Abstract

Most discussions of reservations for women in India have contextualized the issue in relation to the prior move to introduce reservations at the local level (panchayats and municipalities), a rather quiet or at least publicly uncontested process which took place during 1993 and 94 in the form of the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments. This paper, however, demonstrates that the effective history of thinking about political representation in the form of reservations for women is as old as the women’s movement itself. Feminist engagements with the political domain became caught up within dynamics that grew out of the specific dilemmas and contradictions of political representation, and shifted across time from the colonial, to post independence and the more contemporary period after the 1990s, that In have elsewhere designated as ''post national'' (john 2014).