After Bihar became India’s first state to accord 50 per cent reservation for women in panchayats in 2006, the state’s multi-dialect lexicon got ubiquitous neologism “mukhia-pati” — husband of the elected woman panchayat head and the panchayat’s real power centre. A frustrated state government now plans to buck the trend.
Despite the Nitish Kumar-led regime’s initiatives for women’s empowerment in Bihar, meaningful participation of elected women representatives in panchayati raj institutions has been a nonstarter due to rapacious interference by their husbands in virtually all daecision-making processes. Bihar’s panchayati raj minister Bhim Singh was so upset to see husbands of women members sitting in most official meetings that he wrote out an official warning.
“I have directed that they (women panchayat members) will face strict action, including heavy monetary fines, if they continue to bring their husbands to official meetings. The husbands often give advice to their elected spouses at the meetings with officials and even issue orders on their behalf as if they (wives) are mere puppets,” said Mr Singh. His order, issued on Thursday, is expected to deter the persistent trend, but many say the government has to take stronger steps to end the practice.
With women in Bihar still living largely in a male-dominated feudal society and the women panchayat leaders owing their electoral victories almost entirely to their husbands’ political work, experts say independent decision making will remain impossible for women in near future.
“The reservation of half the seats in panchayat bodies for women has defeated the political ambitions of so many men in Bihar that there will be male dominance in all spheres of grassroots democracy. Lack of enough education and real social empowerment of women will prevent the situation from improving,” said economist and commentator N.K. Chaudhary.
But Bihar’s women have shown growing political awareness in recent years. The Nitish Kumar-led government’s pro-women programmes in its first stint resulted in 10 per cent more women voters — 54.85 per cent of Bihar’s 2.5 crore registered female voters — cast their votes in the 2010 Assembly polls than in the 2005 polls. Women voters also surpassed their male counterparts whose turnout in the 2010 polls was 50.70 per cent.