Gender, Governance and Women’s Rights in South Asia

This study focuses on gender equality and democratic governance in the five largest states of the South Asian region, namely, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Beginning with a general introduction to the region, the first section highlights the shared historical and cultural heritage of South Asia and delineates the challenges confronting individual states in the region. The second section explains the difference between Western/ European, and South Asian understandings of democracy, followed by a discussion on the concepts of gender, democracy and governance. The significance of the state and the women’s movement is discussed, and the importance of gender equality as one of the core principles of democratic governance emphasised. The third section delineates and discusses four issues, namely, interest, representation, limits of representative democracy, and neo-liberalism that this paper argues has a bearing on the debate on gender quotas. The fourth section discusses women’s movement mobilisation for reserved quotas in local and national governance institutions in the abovementioned states. Women’s participation in governance institutions is assessed, and the necessity of bridging class inequality and effecting distributive justice underlined. The fifth section identifies key issues with regard to women’s mobilisation for equality in politics in South Asia; the advantages as well as the limits of reservations for women are analysed and summed up. By way of conclusion, this paper suggests that the elimination of social and economic inequality and the implementation of distributive justice are mandatory pre-requisites for achieving gender equality in politics; the women’s movement, it maintains, has a significant role to play towards this end. [Occasional Paper 57] [URL: http://www.cwds.ac.in/OCPaper/occasional-paper-September-57-seema-2011.pdf]