Women in Politics and the Subject of Reservations

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 is elsewhere designated as “postnational” (John 2014). It is surely rather paradoxical to witness a stronger feminist desire to inhabit the legislative apparatus of the state in its colonial and present day ‘neo-liberal’ forms than in the heyday of national development. On the face of it, one would have surely imagined the opposite to be the case. At the same time, certain continuities are also in evidence from the colonial era to the contemporary interest in women’s political representation, which coalesced around the repeated problem of a conflict between conceptions of women’s political rights and rights based on minority status and caste. [CWDS Occasional Paper 62].