The women today feel mislead—I thus carry ‘reservations’

By Harsimran Kaur

I, as a woman, today feel abandoned. I have merely become an incendiary issue of belonging & identity. Why I am bitterly roasted in the incumbency of incandescence politics, and then put to debate; an unruly polemic that has disgraced the entire validity of my being?

A controversary has thus risen, and the entire nation sees the instrumentalization of women, as if my being a woman is an implied atrocity and implied depravity and in such implied provocation, am I suppose to be a specimen of ideological conscription, and how to ignore the putrid objectification? Seeing all this is a bit disconcerting for I become an opportunism among the demagoguery.

Prime Minister Modi’s speech; his command initiated a perspective of woman’s denunciation across decades, but such relevance cannot be a cause of such bewildered, beguiling benevolence of words, and such words soaring of the political representation of women that has been presently rejected by the opposition, and the very defiance of PM Modi came out with a croak in the throat, a creeping stiffness in the neck, and what stuck me at that time was women have become a symbolism of a witty political strategy.

In his speech, he was not at all parsimonious in his riff of the rebarbative opposition that incoherently slapped the tables after the bill did not see the light of the day. It turned out to be a sorcery of a disruptive alliance; the PM thought so. Congress roisters turned out to be a rational precedence accusing BJP of irresponsible politics; the woman, a woman of mysteries and secrets conjuring ‘abra ka dabra’ to spur the ‘Delimitation bill’. Her rights are reserved for later, though, and in such obscurity, I felt, listening to the speech, the redundancy of being a woman through such political outrage. And, in such absorbance of inventive vulnerability, I did feel is woman to be used at a throw of dice? What I listened was a palliative concern but there was sadness, a disassociated isolation for I felt accursed and such empowerment of woman is of no use that ensues contradictory vigilance.

PM Modi looked disturbed of how Indian women will view the parties that voted against the bill, that they aimed to tarnish its growth and development; she will remember! I carry no remorse for the bill getting rejected. I, as an independent identity, feel secured in my skin but what worries me is the political pantomime around women aggrandizement.

What has a woman become; a rooted-instrument, a cat’s paw, a recollection of wreckage and a flagellum of fueled discredibility? Isn’t this a feticide of women’s mindfulness or are we still humping on the feticide of the constitution?

I also have now the opportunity to extrapolate what Priyanka Gandhi, Congress MP, said,

“The move to increase the size of Lok Sabha to 850 implies that men are trying to reserve their seats from being allocated to women’s quota.”

“We are living in a patriarchy.” 

The gender casus belli has not become indolent, if we are supposed to think so; no, it has not! The reckless incredulity around governance is a blot to self-serving impetus of the politicians. And we all know by now that cultural consanguinity never escapes political dilemma. If PM Modi impugns dynasty politics of making women enfeebled, we also see opposition splurging on patriarchal monotony. 

The woman that I am seeks redemption from such obfuscated truths. The liberation of a woman is not dependent on political criticism, and opposition to a bill or in favour will not bring a discerning change in her status.

The day she is liberated form a man’s moral hortatory and his prophetic vision of how she should behave, and the day she becomes the harridan not impeded by male superiority, and a characteristic adventure she becomes, and into a retreat of fecundity of beliefs if she is not mocked, and the day the reason for her displeasure is not a man, the quintessential ‘freedom’ will become her exaggerated dominance.

But again, a sadness prevails because the political adventures of men have compartmentalized women into visions.

The ‘Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam’ (Women’s Reservation Bill) was passed in 2023, when there is a delay in its implementation? It’s not that the Reservation Bill will change the fate of the women but the juxtaposition of it with the Delimitation comes as a deus ex machina. 

Such abstract expressionism; does it hint at a dereliction or a chimera lying in abeyance?

More than criticizing the opposition, the governance of today and previous decades have fallen short of understanding what exactly women want. ‘Reservation’ is a narrative of political ambitions but holistically, women are bereft of idiosyncratic morality. For a free mind, such relativism should be a redolent of virtue; but what is seen is a psychedelic mess of ambitions distorted. Can political parties promise to dust off this mess?

I, therefore ask,

• Can we have bills passed for relative freedom for men & women equally?
• Can there be such a prism where the anachronistic patriarchy will have no right to dishonour women, and why such hubris needs to exist? Are we not worried about dissolving women to non-compos mentis?
• Can the feminist urge to self-regulate her emotions be applauded? Or to view in askance by men has become a de rigueur, and such vanity in in fact a cryptic analogy of self-sustainable goals, and if women were to be a part of it, she is called an iconoclast.

The speech inherently shook something inside me. Nothing changes. The selective intransigence of society still remains. I reserve inside me an unfinished journey, and all the loud & powerful, and the critically harrumphed tone around the ‘Women Reservation Bill’ will go silent. I, thereby, give a clarion call for actualized intentions, a performative appearance and not just pleasurable flattery!