‘Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts (men) absolutely’
INDIRA GANDHI, Pratibha Patil and Sonia Gandhi in India, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Chandrika Kumaratunga and Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka, Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh, Imelda Marcos in Philippines, Margaret Thatcher in the UK, Cristina Fernández in Latin America, Condoleezza Rice in the United States, and the list of women who have made history and news around the world is getting longer and longer. Coming back to India, we have got great number of women torch bearers who have been known for committed social work and work for the general good of the state.
KR Gowri, Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee, Sonia Gandhi, Sushma Swaraj, Uma Bharti, Sheela Dikshit, Ambika Soni and so goes the list of women who have made their marks as leaders and ministers. Though they can’t be called spotless when we look at the credentials of these women, they are all doing much more than what their male counterparts are doing in the name of politics, leadership and nation building.
Even after 60 years of independence, our nation is still vying hard to call itself a developed nation. We have immense resources but many a times our credibility as a nation gets questioned. In the list of most corrupt nations in the world, we have a not-so-low position. And it is this cancerous malady called corruption that eats the economy of this vibrant nation day in and day out.
How can we eradicate this scourge?
It is too ambitious to be thinking on these lines because we tend to sabotage any new social order if it has the least sign of involvement in our individual and personal life.
Still, I think it is fair to hope against hope that the time for this new order has come. I call it gender based representation from panchayats to the Parliament. Many may laugh at it and asking me, hey, where do you think you live? Washington DC? Because the bill for 33 per cent representation for women in the Lok Sabha is gathering dust in the shelves, and not many are optimistic that it would ever see the light of the day. Unless we wake up to the facts, we are going to be in this rut of corruption for ages.
It is not a matter of 33 or 43 per cent. It is a matter of genders and their due representation on the basis of sheer numbers. For example: imagine a panchayat that has 30,000 voters and out of these 30,000 voters, 18,000 are women and 12,000 are men (figures have been rounded up for convenience). Let us assume that, when democratically divided, the panchayat is supposed to have 10 seats, which is one seat (member) for every 3000 voters. So 18,000 thousands women will come to have 6 women representatives, and 12,000 male voters will have 4 male members. In a democratic set up, there is a big difference between 6 and 4. It may sound utopian in this country. But it is worth pursuing, as we are vociferously talking about women empowerment, freedom for female child, gender based discrimination and representation of the poor in the administrative spheres.
Let us see how these 6 female and 4 male members are going to contribute their shares of corruption in terms of power they come wield. We need not go for a study on this proposition. We do not have to be suspicious about the social and developmental contributions these female members are going to put in. Undoubtedly, we can say that these women in power would do much better than those men in power in terms of social harmony, health, general welfare, freedom and development.
Women are known for kindness, care and understanding. They listen to others and understand the basic problems of their own counterparts in the society because they themselves have experienced it. Women feel the pulse of their surroundings, and above all they are abler than men when it comes to translating authority into reality. And most of the societies in our country, women outnumber men, and this superior strength would make very big difference at the grassroot level as well as at the national level.
Gender based proportional representation holds the key to the evil called corruption. Women are clean in matters like money allocation and management. They have great skills in prioritising and identifying problems and solving them. They are god-fearing, cautious of the outcomes of their actions, and are better than men in maintaining a balanced lifestyle with almost no bad habits and association with unholy nexuses. Women who possess great administrative calibre manage millions of Indian families, but unfortunately they are made to confine themselves among the four walls of our culture-obsessed families dominated by male egos.
This has been their plight ever since our civilisation took shape, and we miserably failed to tap and channel the strengths and contributions of our women for the betterment of the nation right after independence. This nation would already have been a developed nation if we had the wisdom to understand that children of a family of two productive and working parents will get better life, health and education than those children who belong to families having only one earning parent.
It is not too late. The whole nation should come to terms with the fact that women are a force to reckon with, and no government can do justice to if a minority runs the majority. In a democracy, numbers hold the key. Whether it is in panchayat administration or in a village, sports club or administration, there should proportional representation based on gender. In multi party election eyewash, the party that gets elected holds the least number of votes as the sheer number of candidates chips away the majority of the votes and distributes those among many political, communal and regional interests. We must understand this miserable plight of modern multi party democracy, and especially men need to know that development cannot take place in a platform where due representation gets sabotaged and corruption rules the roost.
When more and more women show their men that they can run the show equally well or better than their counterparts, both the genders would come to a consensus which in turn may lead to a mutually benefiting social, national and world order. Let us hope and dream and strive towards the same. A completely corruption free society may not come to materialise, but a new order of corruption free representation will take shape.
Large number of women in power leads to smaller number of men in power. In other words, it leads to less corruption. ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts men absolutely’. Is gender based proportional representation not worth a try? It is. I am sure it is. Chak de India.
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