Women in Indian Parliamentary Committees (A Study Of How Justice Prevails In Democratic Parliament)

Parliament is an important institution in the democratic set up. It not only makes laws to govern the country but also balance/curtail the powers of the executive as it has the authority to do so through various mechanisms known to parliament. Since Parliament is overburdened with huge workload and functions for very short duration, say in India for three sessions or 100 days hardly a year, it is not easy to undertake each and every task itself with minute details. Also some work vary in nature and demand utmost special skills/expertise which may not be rendered by all parliamentarians. These functions require special attention and deep deliberations, mere hundred days are not enough to do justice for such tasks. For that purpose it is necessary to have some agency to which these functions may be entrusted to thorough and systematic analysis. Committees are those agencies which perform these tasks carefully.

The Committees constitute expert and knowledgeable persons. Country have no dearth of such persons, however after observing the constitution of our Parliamentary committees, we are made to believe that women are neither expert nor capable to be part of such core groups. Presence of women in the Indian Parliament is awfully low, worst is the situation when they are elected but are given peripheral jobs. Luckily India did not saw movements like suffragette. Both men and women got the right to vote same time unlike many other advanced countries. But their voting right failed to break the hegemonic character imbibed in the social fabric of patriarchal system where women are prevented to enter the male domains. Parliamentary committees are the living example of such gender based discrimination.

The paper is divided into three parts: first part contains the framework used and present scenario, second part deals “WHY” of the scenario while the third is a concluding part.