India, a land of so many colors, added one more color yesterday when Indian politicians took a step towards making history when they voted to reserve a third of all legislative seats across the country for women.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared Saturday his government is committed to “all round social, economic and political empowerment of our women, whatever effort and resources the task might take.” He’ll even fundamentally undermine the foundations of India’s democracy to do it.

That’s the lesson of this week’s parliamentary battle over a bill to reserve one-third of seats in national and state legislatures for the fairer sex. The ruling coalition succeeded in ramming the amendment through the upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha, on Tuesday. Leaders of the ruling Congress Party, opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the minority Communists all support the idea, which has been in the works for 14 years.

It’s easy to see why. Political populism has worked well for Congress for decades, and women compose about 48% of the population. Party leaders could end up wielding more power over who is chosen to run, depending on how prospective female candidates are selected. Plus they win the adoration of powerful nongovernment lobbyists, who are cheering the move as a long-overdue correction for female parliamentary “under-representation.”

This is a cheap way to cloak the bill’s antidemocratic nature. If passed, the bill would fundamentally sever the link between a parliamentarian and his constituency by preventing male politicians for running for office—or re-election—if his district was included in that year’s quota calculation. It would also, perhaps unconstitutionally, infringe on a citizen’s right to choose.

India’s women don’t need a leg up to win political power. By all accounts Sonia Gandhi, who runs the Congress Party, wields more influence than the prime minister. The president is female. A woman runs the country’s largest state. And the leader of the opposition in the lower house is—guess what—a woman.

Once instituted, quotas are hard to roll back. India’s Constitution mandated legislative quotas for lower-caste citizens for a period of 10 years after independence. Those quotas are still in place today because the legislature keeps passing laws to extend them.

Then there’s a slippery slope problem, highlighted by the minority political parties’ objections this week to the bill. They don’t oppose it on the ground that it’s antidemocratic—they want more quotas, based on caste, for their individual constituencies.

India has seen the destructive effects of quotas in many other areas, including education and public-sector jobs. In each case, arbitrary mandates have undermined competition and heightened opportunities for corruption.

There’s no reason to think quotas for women wouldn’t meet a similar fate. Far from liberating women, the women’s bill will enshackle Indian citizens of both sexes and degrade democracy, perhaps permanently. What’s so fair about that?

In what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described as an “historic step forward toward emancipation of Indian womanhood”, the upper house of the country’s federal Parliament voted 186-1 to set aside the seats in the national and state assemblies.

Having overcome more than a decade of opposition, the politicians thumped on their desks to celebrate the bill’s passage.

Even though two of the most influential figures in the history of India since its independence from Britain in 1947 – Indira Gandhi and her daughter-in-law, the current Congress Party leader, Sonia Gandhi – have been women, the country does not do well when it comes to gender equality in politics.

With only 21 women in the 233-member upper house, representing around 9 per cent, and 59 in the 545-member Lower House, or under 11 per cent, India ranks 99th in the world in terms of female representation among MPs.

Pakistan and Bangladesh, both neighbours of India, perform markedly better, according to the study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a Switzerland-based organisation that works to promote democracy.

Sonia Gandhi, the widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi who was assassinated in 1991, and reportedly one of the driving forces behind the measure, told an Indian television channel: “I am relieved … very happy.

“In politics, there are always some risks but the larger picture has to be kept in mind. The support of my party and especially of the women kept me going.”

Outside the Parliament building in Delhi, activists and female politicians celebrated and shouted: “We have made it!”

The passage of the bill, which was first proposed in 1996, has been difficult and faced opposition from many political leaders who believed their male-dominated parties would lose seats.

Other parties have opposed the move because they did not think the legislation went far enough and argued that seats should also be reserved for people from lower castes and ethnic minorities.

On International Women’s Day, a vote on the bill was blocked by unprecedented scenes in the Upper House when opponents snatched copies of the proposed legislation and tore them up.

Yesterday, proceedings were again halted when seven legislators refused to leave the chamber. They were eventually removed by marshals.

Other opponents boycotted the vote, including the Trinamool Congress Party, one of the Government’s allies and whose leader, Mamata Banerjee, is the Railways Minister. Her party said that the Congress Party had not properly consulted its allies before proceeding.

Activists hope that, if the bill is now passed in the lower house as expected, the legislation will inspire Indian women, who still suffer high levels of discrimination.