Involve women in
decision making
By Sushma Swaraj

How would I define empowerment? Empowerment per se means when people are not dependent on others, when they are self-sufficient. There was a time when as children we wrote essays on India's food problem. There was food shortage at that time. But then came a revolutionary programme and we are now self-sufficient in food and are in fact actually exporting food. You could perhaps call this empowerment.

But, in my opinion, I will not think there has been empowerment till half the population of India, that is women, are empowered. This is despite our self-sufficiency in food and our ability to defend our borders. We might be saying we are empowering women politically and economically. The truth is there is a question mark over their existence.

I am referring to female foeticide. Against 1,000 boys born, there are states where only 720 infant girls are born. It isn't that God has changed his attitude. It's just that people use science to determine the sex of a foetus and kill it if it is a girl. There are doctors who have posters over the operation table saying, ''Spend Rs 500 and save Rs 5 lakh''. Laws have been enacted to stop female foeticide. The Supreme Court is also seized of the matter. Yet, female foeticide continues.

Similarly, in the case of rapes. In Delhi, not a day passes when a rape case is not reported in the media. If you take into account all the crimes against women, the crime graph is high. In rape cases, the statistics are alarming.

That is why I always say that unless women are politically empowered and are a part of the decision-making process, all this talk of empowerment will come to naught. That is because it is authority that works.

I'll show how. My surmise is that a woman peon of a woman police officer is more empowered at home than a woman software engineer or a lady doctor. That's because in the case of a woman peon, her authority comes from the police officer she works with.

We have that in politics too. Women workers who are with us feel secure because they know that they can knock on our door at any time and we will stand by them. I'll give you an instance. There is a woman worker who works with me. She lives in the slums. One day she came to invite me for her daughter's wedding. She told me, ''It's alright if you don't come for my son's wedding, but you must come for my daughter's wedding.'' Why? The woman worker explained: ''Because her in-laws will see that there are powerful people behind my daughter.'' This is empowerment.

We are fighting for 33 per cent reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies. I truly believe that even if we have 33 per cent women taking part in the decision-making process, real empowerment will come. And once women are empowered, the whole country will be empowered. As we say, when a girl is educated, she actually goes on to educate two families. Women's reservation will also make gender issues more focussed, and women in some areas will be more empowered.