Ethnic Violence, Gender Quotas and Indigenous Women’s Political Leadership

• In Event: Gender, Violence, and Political Crises

Abstract

Debates rage over the question of the effectiveness of gender quotas on shaping gender equality, political inclusion, and social policy on the ground. More recently, the body of literature on peace-making has pointed to the role played by women during political violence and in the aftermath of ethnic violence, civil wars, and genocides. However, the impact of gender quota in preventing ethnoreligious violence has remained under-investigated in scholarly debates. Furthermore, studies on gender quota in peace-processes often project women leaders as a homogeneous category. In contrast, drawing upon studies that are attentive to questions of quota designs that incorporate intersectionality, this paper foregrounds the role of women leaders from indigenous communities in preventing ethnic violence.

India is an interesting case because its gender quota system for local governance is designed as a “quota within quota” system, which ensures the representation of women from vulnerable groups. To elaborate, the political representation of two historically oppressed groups, Scheduled Castes or Dalits (the self-referential term for groups outside India’s caste system) and Scheduled Tribes or Adivasi (indigenous peoples) of India in the parliament and state assemblies within India’s federal system has been enshrined in the Indian constitution. Since the 1980s, this affirmative action has been expanded to include the Other Backward Castes who lag behind the general population in terms of their socio-economic status. In 1993, political decentralization led to the introduction of a three-tier system of governance which mandated elections in local bodies in rural and urban India. To elaborate, each state is divided across districts, blocks, and villages, and elections are held to ensure local policy-making and implementation; expenditure is devolved at the local level. Gender quotas or 33% reservations for women were introduced for elections in local bodies. The conjunction of community and gender quotas at the lowest level has ensured the representation of women across communities. The quota within the quota system has been significant for increasing the representation of indigenous women, who constitute the most marginalized section in local bodies.

The impact of indigenous women’s leadership at the lowest levels of governance in India remains a neglected area in the literature on gender quotas; no study has depicted their role in preventing ethnic violence in India. Previous scholarship on this subject has identified the role of political rhetoric and symbolic meanings, inter-ethnic civil society, politicians’ interests and agendas, patronage networks, and elite pacts as some of the factors inducing ethnic peace. These studies have focused on understanding ethnic violence or peace at the national, provincial, and city levels in India. The ethnopolitical violence in the Western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002 was an exception as violence against Muslims had affected rural areas. More notably, it had spread to some villages in which the majority of the population were the Adivasi. Indeed, reports on ethnic violence in 2002-2003 point to the role of the Adivasi in participating in ethnic violence in some villages. In contrast, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Western Indian state of Gujarat between 2013- 2014, this study highlights the role of Adivasi or indigenous women leaders in preserving ethnic peace during an episode of ethnic violence in western India. The paper identifies the causal mechanisms underlying conflict in rural areas and generates insights into indigenous women’s localized leadership.

Author

• Gopika Solanki, Carleton University