@akshay do you think women get equal opportunities in our society?

I do not think women get equal opportunities in our society, when taken as a whole.

But the cabinet of Delhi is a 6 member thing. Now 6 is not a very small number like 2 or 3. But in my opinion it is a small enough number to not include any reservations in.

To compare the members based on merit, I do not know any of those politicians very much. In fact I trust AAP enough to be sure that they probably didn't discriminate based on gender, rather chose 6 people based on other criteria. If someone were to let me know more about the current cabinet ministers, and the woman MLA who should have been made a cabinet minister, I could compare them and change my view.

But I still am against posting/endorsing https://aamjanata.com/open-letter-arvind-kejriwal-2/ because of its hostile tone and the sentences like

No matter how sensitive or capable a cabinet minister, I doubt if he will THINK like a woman.

This itself is a divisive statement that says men cannot be empathetic about women. It means that men and women are different, that even their thought processes are different.

In all your wisdom, you may believe that it is not important for the Minister for women and children - who would be the one meeting victims of brutal rapes once this intoxication with your own yet-to-be proven competence dies down. I doubt a victim sees it the same way.

I do accept that rape victims find it difficult to be near a male. But, rape victims are escorted by men to police stations with men, taken to hospitals were male doctors (forensic medicine department) take their statements (but to be fair, any examination is done by female gynecologists, at least in my college), etc. So in the not so common case that a minister visits a rape victim, he wouldn't be the only male to do so.

In short, my opinion is that we can't endorse that blog post, instead we could write a statement similar to this if we want:

Dear AAP, you have to explain the rationale behind not having any women in your cabinet. Your decisions should be transparent and we'd like to know what criteria were used by the party in choosing cabinet ministers. Because if you discriminated against any woman based on her gender, we strongly condemn that.

You can choose to interpret the post so that it fits cliches you are conditioned to sneer at. However, I would like to point out that being empathetic and thinking like a woman are different things. Whether for better or worse, men and women face considerably different realities in India. And I am not speaking of victim and oppressor or any such shit.

When you choose a well balanced team, you choose diverse perspectives. To have women's empowerment on the agenda and not think a real live woman is actually needed on cabinet is like saying a vegetarian can coon non-vegetarian meals well. Perhaps he may, but what does that even mean? And it can hardly be reason enough to have only vegetarians working in your kitchen that serves non-veg meals as well.

AAP was created so that the common man may govern himself. Yet the common man does not extend the same swaraj to women. The idea that women cannot deliver their own rights is as patronizing as saying the common man cannot govern himself.

Can men deliver women's rights? Of course they can. They've been doing it for thousands of years. Handing out what women need while refusing them the power to fix it themselves. It is called patriarchy.

I am backing Vidyut for raising this point & it is obvious for women to get perturbed after reading this. But I would like to stress this link to all, http://www.ndtv.com/photos/news/meet-the-ministers-in-arvind-kejriwal-s-team-16677/slide/3. I don't think Mr. Arvind Kejriwal must have made any prejudicial distinction wittingly. When he had a woman candidate before, there might be some reason for not having now which he will definitely have to answer. But before that we cannot arrive to any conclusion about his intention.
Secondly, I personally abhor & it is extremely deplorable to relate every instance related to women to rape incidents. When everybody say they are proud of their country I don't regret to say that I am ashamed of my country especially the capital for this (read about gang rape of a Nigerian woman in capital yesterday).
Lastly, any gender can oversee The Women and Child Social Welfare portfolio provided the justice is given to the victims without further tormenting them.

@akshay so it is fine to suppress half of the population and expect them to compete with the privilleged other half on merit? When a girl child is told to work in the kitchen and boy child gets a laptop, you think the girl is lacking merit? I see giving women representation as a compensation to the systematic suppression of their freedoms. We can talk about merit when we give them the same opportunities as men. When two persons running a 100 meter race with one person getting to start from 50 meters. There is no merit in the second person winning.

@praveenarimbrathod you're talking about a different issue I believe. I was just talking about the 6 member cabinet and not about women's representation in politics. So if you were comparing opportunities, you'd have to compare the individual backgrounds of Rakhi Birla and Sandeep Kumar and others and see who got laptops first in their life.

Yet I understand your point about participatory politics, about giving women a chance. All I am saying is that keeping all that AAP is doing in Indian politics in mind, them not giving reservation for women in their Delhi 2015 cabinet does not warrant a very hostile statement from Indian Pirates.