by Bappaditya Paul
One is the 60-year old largest democracy of the world, the other a tiny infant democracy, but when it comes to the representations of women in Parliament, both India and Bhutan have the same story to tell.
While the Bill for a 33 per cent reservation for women in the Indian Parliament is beating the dust for years now, Bhutan ~ the world’s newest democracy, too, hardly shows off any better picture for the fairer sex.
In the just concluded first-ever democratic polls in the secluded Himalayan Kingdom, the two Bhutanese political parties in the fray fielded only 10 women candidates out of the total 94 who contested for the 47-member Bhutan National Assembly. The National Assembly happens to be the powerful Lower House in the two-tier Druk Parliament system.
Percentage wise, the women candidates accounted for 10.63 per cent, which is no better than the meager 10 per cent women who contested the 2004 general elections in India.
Of the two political parties that wrestled in the 24 March Bhutan National Assembly elections, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) had fielded six women candidates and the rest four were nominated by the Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT).
Interestingly, the DPT, which has registered a landslide victory by winning 45 of the 47 National Assembly seats, also recorded wins for all its four women candidates, while none of the six PDP women could sail through.
Going by the winning figures, the strength of women in the first-ever Parliament (Lower House) in Bhutan stands at 21.27 per cent, which however, is better than the 8.28 percent women representing in the current Lok Sabha in India.
This is when the world’s largest democracy, India, has by now conducted 14 Lok Sabha elections since Independence, while for the century-old Druk Kingdom, this was the first tryst with democratic elections in its transition to a democratic constitutional monarchy from the absolute monarchy.
(The author is on the staff of The Statesman, Siliguri, India/ the article was originally published in The Statesman dt 31 March 2008 )
