THE 2019 election was one of many firsts, and many historic electoral records. The high level of female voter participation was coupled with an enduring low level of female political representation. In addition to these indisputable facts, however, a narrative also developed that some parties were successful in connecting specifically with women, and that women were able to contribute significantly to, if not swing, the outcome of this election. This piece will attempt to understand the extent of change of female voter participation, examine its causes, investigate the situation of women’s representation in party politics and look at survey data to understand what we know about how women voted and why. In doing so, it will attempt to analyse whether there is now a distinct gender dimension to the outcomes of Indian elections, and its possible impact on India’s electoral future.

The 2019 election was marked by five distinct milestones when it came to women: (i) Female turnout rose to its highest ever point; (ii) The gap between male and female turnout is now the closest it has ever been; (iii) The number of women candidates was at a historic high, and representation became an electoral issue; (iv) The largest number of women in history were elected as members of Parliament; and (v) The voting preferences of women – independent from those of men – could have had some impact on the outcome.

Historically in India, women voters have lagged behind male voters at every stage of the electoral process; there are fewer women than men in the population, then fewer still women than men on the electoral rolls, and yet fewer women than men among those who voted.

That has changed substantially over time, with the male-female gap in both electors and voters narrowing. The trend holds true for state elections too. Economists Mudit Kapoor and Shamika Ravi find that female turnout in elections has increased systematically from a voter sex ratio of 715 in the 1960s to 883 in the 2000s.¹ This change took place not only in the more progressive southern, western and eastern states, but also across the relatively backward Hindi-speaking north-central states, as well.

 

What is driving this increase in female voter turnout? For one, it could be part of an overall improvement in women’s independent access to the public sphere. On some key indicators of female autonomy, especially within the household, Indian women have made some gains. The share of women who have a bank account grew from 18% to 55% between 2004-05 and 2011-12, according to successive rounds of the India Human Development Survey, a large sample nationally representative household survey conducted by the National Council of Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland. The share of married women who participate in household decisions grew from 77% in 2005-06 to 84% in 2015-16, according to the National Family Health Survey.

Post-election nationally representative household surveys conducted by Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) have shown that around six out of 10 female respondents in 2014 were exposed to news media, up from a little over one-third in 2009. Women’s participation in political activities like attending rallies or political meetings also grew.²

In addition to the growing mobility and independence of women, the rise in female turnout also owes in large part to the Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation programme launched by the Election Commission of India after the 2009 national elections (SVEEP). SVEEP included the removal of the gender gap in electoral participation as one of its primary aims. The methods employed by district election officers under SVEEP range from sharing information about women’s electoral rights during immunisation drives, setting up of polling booths manned only by women and speeding up queues for women, to taking the help of the ASHA or anganwadi worker to give information about the documents required to young married women.

 

Despite the 2019 election seeing the highest ever female voter turnout, the sex ratio of voters remains more skewed against women than that of electors, and further more skewed than that of the general population. Meanwhile, male turnout has increased only modestly. The 2014 election saw the biggest ever increase in the number of both male and female voters since the existence of the Indian electorate as it currently is, likely evidence of voter enthusiasm in favour of the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance and a widespread anti-incumbency sentiment. Between 2014 and 2019, there was only a modest increase in male voters. In several states, the closing gap in male and female voter turnout is also a result of plateauing male turnout.

There is some evidence of the Election Commission being unable to respond nimbly enough to the migration of voters. The Bengaluru based civic rights advocacy organization, Janaagraha, conducted a pilot study in Delhi, taking a sample of names from electoral rolls, and then attempting to locate those persons. The study found that 21% of sampled citizens who were on the list had shifted to another location. Simultaneously, 28% of surveyed residents were not on the list but later found that their names were in the ‘polling part’ of the electoral roll of another part of the city.³

 

It is conceivable that the Election Commission is doing an insufficiently good job of capturing migrants, or that short-term migrants are unable to vote on the day of the election, or that a lack of time and opportunity is preventing some men from being able to vote. In the 2009 post-election National Election Study conducted by Lokniti-CSDS, a quarter of respondents who had not voted said that this was because they were not in their hometown at the time of election, and a further 10% did not have the right documents.

A study by political scientists Rahul Verma, Pranav Gupta and Pradeep Chhibber in Banda, Uttar Pradesh, finds that turnout in polling stations with high migration (25% and above) was three percentage points lower than the overall average. This difference was only for male turnout, not female, as migration in India is largely among men. ‘This evidence suggests that recent contraction of gender gap (i.e. the difference between male and female turnout) may be a statistical artefact if one accounts for the proportion of migrant electors’, the authors say.⁴

While some of the states with the highest relative disadvantage for male voters – Uttarakhand, Bihar, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Himachal Pradesh – are commonly seen as being more gender equal, they are also states with high out-migration.

 

Is this growing cohort of women voters able to find female candidates, if they should want to vote for a woman? Since March 2010, the Women’s Reservation Bill that would reserve one-third of seats in state legislatures and Parliament for women candidates only has awaited passage in the Lok Sabha. In its absence, the share of tickets that parties decide to give to women is, at the moment, voluntary.

The 2019 election saw the highest ever number of women candidates in history contesting the election, while the number of male candidates declined. 719 – or 9% of all candidates were women in the 2019 election.⁵ This was marginally higher than the 8% of candidates in 2014, or the 7% in 2009 and 2004, who were women. The Congress fielded 54 women candidates and the BJP 53, which makes up less than 13% of both their candidate lists. In 2014, the Congress fielded 60 women and the BJP 38.

Significantly, this was the first election where representation for women candidates became a political issue. Leading from the front was Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal. Patnaik announced that he would give 33% of tickets to women. The Trinamool Congress, which has historically fielded a higher share of women candidates than most other major parties, followed suit by declaring that 41% of its candidates were women. These twin announcements triggered wide media discussion about the need for political parties to improve the share of women candidates in their lists, and revived demands for the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill.

There is some evidence that reservation at the local body level – as per the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution, one-third of seats in panchayats and urban local bodies are reserved for women – has created a growing pool of women political leaders, who are then tapped by political parties for state and national leadership roles. Once a constituency has been reserved, it also becomes more likely to elect women in the future.⁶

Emory University economist Stephen D. O’Connell finds that quotas at the local government level increase later female candidacy in both state and national legislature elections, and the effect is larger at the Parliament level. (However, the new female candidates that local governments throw up run largely as independents, and rarely win the elections they contest.⁷)

 

In a study of 32 women-led panchayats in Tamil Nadu, the data journalism portal India Spend found that 30% of the women sarpanches said they would like to contest the upcoming panchayat elections even when their seat was an unreserved one. 15% said they would like to enter mainstream electoral party politics if given a chance.⁸ Both studies are strong evidence of the impetus that the 73rd and 74th Amendments have given to the political ambitions of women, but also point to the fact that political parties are not adequately responding to this growing ambition at higher levels of government.

Another vast pool of potential female political talent is the army of ASHA and anganwadi workers – nearly one million and 1.4 million strong respectively – whose frequent interaction with local political leadership and district administration makes them ripe for political training. Several states have their own additional armies of Self Help Group workers. One such notable example in 2019 was Pramila Bisoi, a 70-year-old former SHG leader in Odisha who rose to become BJD MP from Aska, now seen as an embodiment of the BJD’s commitment to raising the share of female representation.

 

In parliamentary elections, the presence of a high profile woman candidate sometimes leads to the clustering of women candidates in those constituencies. In 2019, the largest number of women candidates were in Chandigarh, from where the high profile BJP MP and movie star Kirron Kher contested and won. Mumbai North where movie star Urmila Matondkar contested unsuccessfully on a Congress ticket saw seven female candidates as did Bhopal, from where Pragya Singh Thakur, who is standing trial on terrorism charges, contested and won on a BJP ticket.

Goa and Mizoram have the highest share of women candidates (17%), followed by Odisha and Chhattisgarh (14%). Tripura, West Bengal, Meghalaya, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Kerala also have a higher share of women candidates than the national average.

The ‘strike rate’ of women elected was over five percentage points higher than that of male candidates in 2019, but this is in part a result of the large number of male Independents. When it comes to the major political parties, women candidates do not always do significantly better than men. Of the 55 women given tickets by the BJP in 2019, 41 or 75% won. Meanwhile, of the 370 men given tickets by the BJP, 301 or 80% won.

 

The 17th Lok Sabha will have the highest number of women in history. (This would still, however, place India in the 150th-160th position among 193 countries in terms of female representation in Parliament.⁹) 78 women were elected as Members of Parliament, up from the previous high of 66 in 2014.

The largest contingent comes from the BJP, but women form only 14% of their total MPs. The major party with largest share of women MPs is the Trinamool Congress with over one-third of its MPs women.

As a share of its total strength in the House, West Bengal has sent the most women. Nearly half of all women MPs come from just four states – 14% from Uttar Pradesh, 12.8% from West Bengal, 10.3% from Maharashtra and 9% from Odisha.

The profile of women MPs is diverse, but there are some broad trends. Women MPs are more likely to come from political families. The Social Profile of Indian National and Provincial Elected Representatives project finds that 30% of all Lok Sabha MPs belong to political families. Women are more likely than men to require a family connection to contest and win; 42% of female contestants belonged to political families as compared to 15% male candidates.¹⁰ (Untested women are less likely to get tickets, as a result of which the re-contesting rate of women candidates tends to be higher than that of men.¹¹)

The new Cabinet has three women among its total strength of 24, no female ministers of state with independent charge of a ministry and three ministers of state among 24. Nirmala Sitharaman is India’s first full-time finance minister; former PM Indira Gandhi held the portfolio when she was PM. This is the lowest female representation among the council of ministers in two decades, and a further decline from 2014.¹²

 

One of the key narratives in the analysis of the 2019 result was that this time women played a defining role in the final outcome. This is an important matter to investigate because it would, in many ways, upturn decades of scholarship about the nature of the women’s vote in India.

Going by post-election data from National Election Studies conducted by Lokniti-CSDS after every Lok Sabha election, women have not historically expressed substantially different views on what they are voting for than men. Additionally, in its January 2014 large sample nationally representative household survey, the Lok Foundation/Centre for Monitoring of India Economy found only marginal differences in what men and women said about the issues that would most influence their voting choices. Women appeared to care a little more than men about inflation and a little bit less about corruption.¹³

Additionally, women are not a homogenous bloc; multiple identities intersect in the decision matrix of a voter. A young Dalit girl in Agra, a first-time voter interviewed by the Hindustan Times, was motivated both by a desire for women’s safety and her yearning for self-respect and opportunities for marginalized people like herself.¹⁴ A Muslim woman in Godhra interviewed by Scroll.in was proud that a man from her state was prime minister, and wasn’t familiar with the term ‘Hindutva’.¹⁵ A farmer in Telangana believed she must vote for the party her village head chose.¹⁶

 

Some political leaders have a clear advantage in the eyes of women voters. For instance, regional political parties led by women – the Mehbooba Mufti-led People’s Democratic Party, the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party, the (until recently) Jayalalithaa-led All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and the Mamata Banerjee-led All India Trinamool Congress – all did better among female voters than among male voters in 2014. Among male leaders, Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United), Shivraj Singh Chouhan of the BJP, K. Chandrashekar Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, and Naveen Patnaik of the Biju Janata Dal all enjoyed an advantage among female voters.

The BJP has historically had trouble appealing to women voters. Successive rounds of the NES conducted between 1996 and 2009, show that the BJP has generally had a two to three point disadvantage among women voters as compared to the Congress. Even in 2014,Lokniti-CSDS found that while the BJP had gained supporters among all groups, including women, preference for the BJP among women remained four percentage points lower than that among men. On the other hand, despite losing support across the board, the Congress still remained more popular among women than it was among men.

 

A November 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that Modi was popular among both men and women, but he was viewed less favorably by women in relative terms. The Pew survey found that women were especially critical of Modi’s handling of Hindu-Muslim relations.¹⁷ By 2018, there was already evidence that this was changing. Lokniti-CSDS’ May 2018 pre-poll survey found that support for the BJP among women had grown faster than among men since 2014.

Post-2019 surveys clearly indicate that the BJP made gains among women, but key pollsters disagree about the extent of its gains. The Axis-My India exit poll, whose vote share and seat projections were also close in accuracy to the final result, found that the BJP has reversed its historical female disadvantage; the party had found greater support among women than among men in 2019, the survey said. Another reputed polling agency, CVoter, concurred. However, Lokniti-CSDS was the lone dissenter; the organization says that its post-poll survey indicates that the BJP’s female disadvantage remains unchanged. Modi was also more popular among men than women as a PM candidate, and the BJP’s female supporters were more likely to be young, upper caste, educated and rich, they find.

 

If the BJP did make big gains in its appeal to women, the reasons for it can at present only be hypothesized about. Some commentators claim that the Ujjwala scheme aimed at enabling families that use solid fuels for cooking to switch over to LPG earned it the gratitude of women. Undoubtedly, the burdens imposed by the use of solid fuels – the task of collection, the labour-intensive process of lighting and maintaining the fire, and the health impact of inhaling the smoke – falls overwhelmingly on women. It is also clear that the scheme was in many ways a success (although the extent to which beneficiaries continue to use LPG is debatable).¹⁸

Others have suggested that the BJP’s focus on sanitation struck a particular chord for women who bear the brunt of hygiene and safety dangers from open defecation. There are some who argue that the party’s hardline stance against triple talaq gained it female Muslim voters, but this rests on the assumption that the BJP gained Muslim voters, an assumption that CVoter says emerges from its exit poll, but that is refuted by Axis-My India and Lokniti-CSDS.

In the Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey, the Ujjwala Yojana was the top answer when voters were asked to name one policy or programme of the Modi government that they liked the most.¹⁹ This was followed by Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Jan Dhan Yojna, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana and Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao. Among women beneficiaries of the Ujjwala scheme, more women voted for the BJP compared to those who did not benefit from it (41% and 33% respectively). Among women beneficiaries of the Jan Dhan Yojana, 42% of women beneficiaries opted for the BJP compared to 34% of non-beneficiaries.

 

On the whole, however, there isn’t yet direct evidence that women voters had any of these schemes in mind while voting for the BJP; after all, voters typically tend to give state governments more credit for flagship central government welfare schemes than they do the party ruling at the Centre.²⁰

However, the 2019 election appeared to be marked by a new acknowledgement of the importance of women voters. All leading political parties actively courted women voters in speeches and in their manifestos, and the Congress advanced a new promise of 33% reservation in central government jobs for women. The final outcome in terms of the share of women MPs, their family connections, and the share of women in ministerial positions has come as a relative disappointment. Women voters stood up to be counted in 2019, and political parties appeared to be taking note. Whether this translates into true women-friendly policy remains to be seen.

 

Footnotes:

1. Mudit Kapoor and Shamika Ravi, ‘Women Voters in Indian Democracy: A Silent Revolution’, Economic and Political Weekly 49(12), 22 March 2014. https://papers.ssrn. com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2231026

2. https://www.livemint.com/Politics/PyQ7 hlxIkiyXlsUqq7JbOL/The-growing-importance-of-women-as-an-electoral-consti-tuency.html

3. http://www.janaagraha.org/files/publications/Quality-of-Lists-Delhi-2015-Summary.pdf

4. https://theprint.in/opinion/not-just-political-apathy-faulty-electoral-rolls-to-blame-for-lower-lok-sabha-poll-turnout/235699/

5. Based on data from election affidavits analysed by the Association for Democratic Reforms.

6. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27798484?seq =1#page_scan_tab_contents

7. https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/social-identity/quota-policies-and-career-advancement-evidence-from-indian-politics.html

8. https://www.indiaspend.com/why-277160- women-leaders-remain-invisible-to-tamil-nadus-political-parties-71288/

9. http://archive.ipu.org/wmn-e/arc/classif 010119.htm

10. https://scroll.in/article/925313/verdict-2019-in-charts-and-maps-lok-sabha-has-more-female-mps-than-ever-before-more-dynasts-too

11. https://www.bu.edu/econ/files/2016/04/Iyer-BCI_PathBreakers_Jan2016.pdf

12. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/ diversity-in-india-s-ministries-from-nehru-to-modi-1559721774887.html

13. https://scroll.in/article/893869/how-india-votes-has-the-bjp-gained-enough-women-voters-under-narendra-modi-to-seal-2019

14. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/our-caste-won-t-change-that-doesn-t-mean-we-can-t-progress/story-VIKLO uWdNG0myM6mujEZXJ.html

15. https://scroll.in/article/919406/half-the-vote-a-muslim-woman-in-godhra-says-shes-proud-that-a-man-from-her-state-is-prime-minister

16. https://scroll.in/article/919238/half-the-vote-this-farmer-wants-to-protect-her-land-but-will-vote-for-the-party-her-village-picks

17. Bruce Stokes, Dorothy Manevich and Hanyu Chwe, ‘Three Years In, Modi Remains Very Popular’, Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, November 2017), http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/11/15/india-modi-remains-very-popular-three-years-in/

18. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/yv2es/

19. However, an equal proportion of men and women (34%) in the study reported to have benefited from the Ujjwala Yojana.

20. https://scroll.in/article/921870/how-india-votes-does-it-matter-what-voters-think-of-state-governments-during-a-lok-sabha-election