Status of women in constituent assembly: A case study of constituent assembly election 2007, Nepal

Abstract

When CPN (Maoist) started waging war in Nepal in 1996 a revolutionary tinge of women’s activism was seen in the rural area based subaltern women. Anthropologists have sufficient ground to examine the Maoists’ claims of radical social transformation in the light of women’s experiences on the ground. Based on fieldwork in several areas, they consider how the intersecting lines of class, caste, ethnicity, religion, gender and history shape individual women’s political consciousness and motivations for enlisting as guerrilla cadre. Since Nepali Maoist models for women’s “empowerment” must negotiate between overarching Maoist ideologies and the existing particularities of gender discrimination in Nepali society. Some people saw noticeable gaps between rhetoric and practice. Ultimately, after the Maoists adopted the mainstream democratic process and Nepal carried out the CA election, women’s representation has reached almost to the level of thirty three percent despite the fact that fundamental changes in gender relations that the Maoists assert may not be the intentional result of their policies, but the largely unintended consequences of the conflict that emerge in relation to women’s existing practice Maoist women’s involvement was, quite debatably, voluntary and was not intermittent. Being away from social mainstream and having left home and houses for uncertain times, they were the full fledged women activists. But, in the cases of non-Maoist women only the certain days, events, accidents and issues would call for their activism and participation. The Maoist women could have been mustered for the war but once they entered, they served in the war seemingly and for their understanding, voluntarily. Their offences , defenses , assault ,marriage, love matters, inability to rehabilitate back, party’s doting rules and many other circumstances compelled them to be the full-fledged women activists. After the peace process started the women couldn’t divert back to the previous lives so it helped the Maoist women intensify their agenda and propagate accordingly for the electoral success.