Rai, Shirin. "Democratic Institutions, Political Representation, and Women's Empowerment: The quota debate in India". Democratization, Vol.6, No.3 (1999): 84-99.

Rai, Shirin. "Democratic Institutions, Political Representation, and Women's Empowerment: The quota debate in India". Democratization, Vol.6, No.3 (1999): 84-99.

• 'Empowerment' is defined as: "a legitimation of oppositional discourse as well as of oppositional social movements, of programmes, of methodologies, of policies -- both macro and micro" (85).
• The 73rd and 74th amendments to the Indian Constitution, passed 22 December 1992, devolved significant powers to the 'panchayati raj' system of local governments, at the same time including a provision requiring that 1/3 of all representatives be women (87).
• The results of this initiative have been significant, with hundreds of thousands of women being elected to elected government, even exceeding the 33% mandatory minimum in West Bengal. The 1996 elections, however, produced a Lok Sabha with only 36 female MPs, prompting some to call for a quota system on the national level, a proposed 81st amendment (87-88).
• Some feminist scholars are argued that the move to embrace the quota system only serves to open up a narrow political field from elite men to elite women, not addressing the broader economic and social issues which have a far greater impact on gender inequality in India (89).
• On this issue, Nancy Fraser provides insight into different ways of dealing with socio-economic gaps between social gaps. Dr. Fraser argues that they can be bridged by the affirmation approach, which reinforces distinct group identities by redistributing economic resources on this basis; or the transformative remedy, which subverts the fundamental societal structure which produces unequal outcomes and thus reduces group affiliation (89-90).
• Indian women's movements have been fractured since the 1990s, largely out of different reactions to the liberalization of the country during that period. In particular, the primary strategy of pressuring trade unions to be equal fell through as the importance of these organizations collapsed and the majority of women fell into unorganized labor. The feminist movement has been polarized by how to react to this and other new social issues (90).
• The framers of the Indian Constitution realized that the immense power of the caste system and the social and economic constraints it placed on lower-caste individuals meant that a fully individualistic liberal system could not address social or economic inequality. As a result, the Constitution features a policy of 'reservation', whereby some positions are reserved for scheduled castes or tribal peoples (91).
• The proposed amendment to extend reserved parliamentary seats to women thus intersected with previous debates over caste reservations. In fact, a large part of the failure to pass the 81st amendment in 1993 was conflict over proposals of the Rashtriya Janata and Samajwadi parties to have an intersectional reservation system considering both gender and caste (92, 94-95).
• Supporters of the introduction of a quota system for women in national elections argue that will allow women to access political arenas previously dominated by men which they have been largely excluded from due to social limitations. The National Commission for Women has supported this position since 1991 (92-93).
• There are two primary arguments against electoral quotas for women: one is that such a system would be inherently undemocratic and oppose the development of a meritocratic system; the other is that women cannot be accurately represented as a single group and thus a quota for women makes little political sense (94).
• "The quota bill is, 'the creation of a new constituency which is not defined by social or economic criteria, strictly speaking, and whose characteristics are, in fact totally unknown - even the representatives of this [reserved] constituency would be unable to say what it is that women stand for and men don't..." (95).
• The majority of the female MPs in the 1991-1996 Indian parliament were middle-class professionals with no connections to the women's movement. Many had gotten into politics through family connections. The fact that is the profile of a female Indian politician raises questions about the benefits of more female politicians, since the current selection is not socially diverse nor seem to express substantial different positions than the rest of their parties (95-96).
• The core argument of the article is that there is substantial worry that increasing the representation of women in national politics as a group will further silence lower-caste women and other women who are socially and economically marginalized by empowering a group of unrepresentative spokeswomen for the gender who do not actual support the interests of many poor and marginalized women (97).