The feminization of electoral politics

TARA KRISHNASWAMY

THIS question of reasonable women’s representation in national and state legislatures is one that has plagued India for long. Even the Constituent Assembly that framed the Constitution, debated setting aside seats exclusively for women. The handful of female framers declined it, relying on the constitutional compact of equality of opportunity in political representation.

Seven and a half decades later, that having been proved illusory with the paltry presence of women in the legislatures, the question stays extant. Parties which serve as portals to legislatures are disproportionately filled with men in their ranks, leadership and election committees, elbowing out women from political socialization, growth and most crucially, electoral opportunities. Forget candidacy, the events of the Great Indian Election Tamasha, of breathtaking size, scale, and grandeur, are a testosterone rave.

Perhaps this is why male and female politicians across the spectrum support reservations as the only
way forward to ensure women’s representation. They are also influenced by the precedents of the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution, passed in 1991/92, due to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, that imbued rural and urban governments with at least one-third female representation. It also had an ancillary benefit; a steady pipeline of women who could conquer elections, tame administration, and rise from the grassroots.

Data from 1999 shows that the women winning local government elections have not been fielded in state and national ballots. Despite over 3 million (30 lakhs) women elected in the third tier over the last two decades, barely 8-10% female candidates have been fielded in the General Elections by political parties.

Electoral politics is sandwiched between an entry gate, the political party, and an exit gate, the ballot. The area in-between is almost exclusively an old boys club, neither bound by law nor self-regulation to be gender inclusive. Women in parties, on the other hand, wait in that wasteland that is an ever-winding queue for electoral nominations, leading mostly to a shut ticket-window. It is this evidence that triggered the citizens collective, Shakti, to look beyond a silver bullet approach of reservation of constituencies for women and discern that gender-representative ballots are essential to gender-balanced legislatures.

Shakti – Political Power to Women – or simply Political Shakti, was born in the Fall of 2018. Conceived as an electoral machine, it is a pan-India, non-partisan collective of volunteers with the express purpose of increasing women’s representation in the state Legislative Assembles, and also the Parliament. It took on the onus of championing women’s political power via grassroot campaigns, with a multidimensional and intersectional view of stakeholders in the electoral process. Shakti recognized that voters, political parties and their leadership, media, female candidates and their campaigns, electoral institutions like the Election Commission, Members of Parliament, and the government are all players who can legitimately impact women’s representation, and therefore are objects of campaigns.

An inference from grassroots campaigns is that not laws nor self-regulations, nor the disciplining by electoral ombudsmen, nor internal power shifts, but instead, the female voter has been the most effective pressure valve on political parties. This essay delineates Shakti’s campaigns, the politicization of the women voter, and its impact on ‘gendering’ the ballot.

The maiden grassroots campaign of Shakti that created a network and volunteer base nationally was a calendar-driven event. The Winter session of the 16th Lok Sabha was the last chance before the 2019 General Elections to champion the cause of women’s representation to one of its key stakeholders: Members of Parliament.Volunteers designed the ‘Call your MP’ national campaign for 27 December 2018. Over 500 female and male volunteers from 21 states called Members of the Lower House of Parliament in a span of two and a half hours, demanding the tabling of the Women’s Reservation Bill.

The languishing, decade-old Women’s Reservation Bill may have lapsed, and a new one required to be drafted, but as a citizens collective, Shakti’s primary leverage is one of raising popular demands, not drafting policy. It would be up to the people’s representatives, the MPs, to assign a committee to draft a bill as required and negotiate a consensus, as a milestone towards the demand. That would indeed have been an ideal outcome. However, while the bill was not tabled in that session, it was a landmark campaign in many ways. It was an adrenalin rush for volunteers who had never before spoken to an MP. It was a first for MPs too, who received synchronized calls from citizens with a common demand. And an unusual occurrence during Zero Hour the next day, when MPs, with no prior arrangement across parties, spontaneously echoed a just-surfaced public demand from Shakti’s calls. Members who demanded the bill were from the Congress, CPI (M), AAP, TRS, BJD and also CPI, DMK, AIADMK, SP, TDP, JD(U) among others. In fact, ruling BJP MP Vinay Sahasrabuddhe went on record to support the campaign and the bill in media.

Shakti campaigners learned some salient lessons. One, that individual Parliamentarians do not have the autonomy to pressure ruling govern-ment into action, even with a spontaneous issue-based coalition. Two, that Shakti cannot be a one-trick pony, carping on the bill alone. Women’s representation finds itself bottlenecked on the trickle of women entering the electoral cycle. Campaigners need to mount pressure on political parties to increase the inflow, i.e. ensure that more female candidates are nominated to the ballot. ‘Call Your MP’ was also Shakti’s first India-wide recruitment of volunteers who were raring to go.

Thereafter commenced a series of campaigns to increase female candidates fielded by parties for the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. Political parties had been fielding an average of 8-10% women in elections, a minuscule number.

Shakti petitioned parties with this demand, and hosted ground events in the 2019 election melas, but the 2020 Bihar elections posed a challenge. Covid lockdowns forced campaigns to be creative without crowds and protests. The collective brainstormed and initiated the Selfless Selfie campaign: the ‘selfie’, a quint essentially selfish instrument would be repurposed for a collective political demand.

In 2020, Bihar had over 4000 female Mukhiyas, or elected chiefs of the Panchayats (rural governments). If a demand for increasing female candidacies could be augmented by them, it would be significant to political parties. The reasoning was that each Mukhiya was the voice of at least 1500 voters.

Volunteers and Shakti’s partner groups, about 80 NGOs who joined hands for this demand, approached the Mukhiyas. They were asked to hold up a placard saying, ‘I demand 50% female candidates on the ballot!’, click a selfie and post it on the Shakti group. Once again, this was a first for the Mukhiyas and it captured their imagination. Hundreds of selfies poured in, some even from male Mukhiyas! This viral campaign made the pages of the print media, and the series culminated with the ruling JD(U) announcing 19% female candidates. This was unprecedented in the state. Other parties too fielded more women than before, the average going up from 8% to 10%.

Similar experiences were also encountered during Shakti’s Lok Sabha 2019 campaigns. Both the ruling AITC of Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, and the BJD of Naveen Patnaik in Odisha, made announcements for 41% and 33% female candidates respectively, buoying the eventual representation of women in the Lok Sabha.

Despite such reaffirming outcomes, citizen campaigners cannot simply impute a linear causatum between their actions and end results. In fact, there is rarely a singular cause and effect in political transformations. Shakti’s conversations with party cadres, office bearers, elected representatives and political observers also revealed a multilayered web of decision making in parties. Even in other citizen campaigns, for instance, the sustained protests by lakhs of farmers for over a year for the repeal of the Farm Laws, impending elections and the plummeting popularity of the Prime Minister also obligated the outcome.

Shakti’s March 2019 International Women’s Day ground campaign in eight cities and 19 districts of nine states, targeted the constitutional gatekeeper of fair elections – the Election Commission of India. Hundreds of domestic workers, farmers, activists, IT workers, NGOs, students, lawyers and other women ‘took the knee’ on the streets, as a metaphor for a gender-imbalanced Parliament.

Slogans like ‘EC neither free nor fair, Tickets to women are so rare!’, and ‘From man to man is a Manliament. What we want is a Parliament’ rent the air in Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Odiya, Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi. No campaign had ever been waged against the Election Commission of India, even as this one appealed to them to recommit male-dominated nomination lists to political parties and foment a balance. Shakti knew that it lacked the authority to deny parties their contest despite gender-skewed lists but entreated them to rap the parties’ knuckles. The ECI failed to do so.

Petitions were submitted to many party chiefs from 2018 to 2021, entreating them to field at least 50% female candidates. Party presidents incredulously responded with: ‘Where are the women?’ or ‘Show me female candidates, they don’t exist!’ even as they bragged about their voluminous female cadre in election campaigns. Warnings also emerged from conversations with female aspirants in parties that such would be the counter. For the next set of petitions, Shakti volunteers wisened up and took along a few female aspirants from the party and reminded them of local government victors. Pat came the response, ‘But district secretaries must identify them as local leaders’.

District leaders claimed that women did not hold booth and block level lead positions and did not
have a geographical base or party experience to deserve being nominated. Low level and mid-level female cadre conversations, however, de-constructed the intense patriarchy that blocked women from mobility. Even though some parties like the BJP and the INC made provisions for gender balance in office bearer positions, those lay vacant for the lack of male willingness to appoint women. There were cement walls at every turn, shutting women off from accessing power in political parties. In fact, sitting female MPs and MLAs were selfishly grateful to Shakti for being external spokespersons, pressuring party establishments on their behalf.

Political parties are entities based on electoral survival without which they have no tomorrow. Once they learn to win, they become entrenched creatures of habit, averse to change, and paranoid about retaining whatever power they have garnered. It is only when their survival is threatened by voter migration or regulatory changes that they are forced to adapt. For example, Indian voter affinities towards Hindutva politics have caused several parties to swing rightward. Similarly, when the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution were passed, reserving 33% of local government seats for women, political parties were forced to comply.

Then, and till date, the old boys networks that run most parties offer vigorous resistance to gender balance. In lieu of legitimate independent women, they derive vicarious power fielding wives or daughters of male aspirants. In fact, parties may legally field 100% male candidates since there are no laws to break or ombudsman to blink.

It is a puzzle then, why the JD(U) in Bihar, BJD in Odisha and AITC in West Bengal placed many more women on the ballot. Citizen pressure alone could not have ensured this. Indian law and institutions of democracy offer no solace to gender representation, and that is why the stance of these three parties is all the more intriguing. Interactions with political players within and beyond
the parties during Shakti’s Bihar campaigns shed some light. Several of the JD(U) female candidates were party office-bearers, multi-term representatives or people who switched from rival parties. However, about one-third are political greenhorns, connected to powerful men or political families. This is the same journey the multi-term female MLAs took in the past.

Female party cadres swear by party chief, Nitish Kumar’s resolve towards women’s empowerment to explain this. Nitish Kumar has a long history of gender-balanced socio-economic schemes. He was the first to boost the 33% reservation for women in local governments to 50%. He reserved jobs for women in the government and police force, helped women’s self-help groups and education for girls.

Female voters have tended to lean towards the JD(U) and therefore the 19% election candidacies for women could have followed naturally. However, all electoral decisions are based on attracting the vote and the link between incremental female vote share for a party already bagging the female vote, and the incremental female candidacies, are tenuous. The following table validates the volatility of his commitment to women’s representation.

Male leaders and political observers add a dose of cynicism or, perhaps realism, about the JD(U). The electoral landscape of Bihar has been heavily mined by caste politics that it has hit a ceiling for returns. There are slim pickings along caste lines if the JD(U) is looking for a chunky slice of the vote bank pie; but the women’s vote is significant.

Moreover, they also believe that it is a defensive strategy to keep men of certain castes away from electoral victory, which is the ultimate power grab. Women of those castes, coming from political families, are acceptable as they know their place; a station that is clearly lower due to their gender. What both the faithful and the cynical agree on is that it is his personal calculation for a package that woos the female vote. There is no institutional party mechanism to support women’s representation.

The West Bengal gender representation story has a longer arc. Mamata Banerjee of the AITC is also known for her female-oriented socio-economic schemes. She too attracts the female vote. She has been consistently above average on gender-balance in her candidate list as Table II shows. In her 15 years of leading the TMC, 62 women have been elected whereas the Left had just 111 women elected in 54 years. Her party has bagged the female vote, both in excess of their male vote in every election and compared to her closest electoral rivals, the Congress in 2011, the Left in 2014, the Left-Congress combine in 2016, and the BJP in 2019 and 2021. Many of her female candidates are experienced legislators or party office bearers. One-fourth are newbies, some of whom are lateral entries from fields like cinema, banking, and suchlike.

Mamata Banerjee’s sympathizers believe that she is genuinely committed to a fair stake for women, including Muslim women. Her record of government schemes and five elections of increasing female candidacies, speaks for itself. Critics, on the other hand, point to incidents of violence against female candidates of other parties by AITC cadre and other crimes against women going unheeded. It is also said that rank newbies and non-members, especially public personalities, both male and female, get nominated so that she can groom loyalists, break factions, dis-enfranchise challengers and breed unquestioned obedience among the beneficiaries.

It is worth noting that in the 2011 elections, when she nominated 14% female candidates, the incumbent Goliath fielded 40 women of its 213, amounting to nearly 19% women nominated to the ballot. It is well known that there is no party framework for gender-balanced candidate lists, but instead, largesse is a factor of Mamata Banerjee’s personal propensities, as are vote bank calculations and intra-party power play.

There is a trajectory to women as electoral actors and their engagement as such, by political parties. This story begins with the granting of universal suffrage right at Independence in 1947, ahead of women’s enfranchisement. The Constitution of India granted suffrage to all adults at Independence in 1947, ahead of women’s enfranchisement in countries like Israel, Mexico, Belgium, and the People’s Republic of China. However, during the preparation of electoral rolls, the Election Commission discovered that lakhs of registered female voters were nameless. They simply identified themselves as a man’s wife or daughter, refusing to divulge their names to rank strangers preparing the rolls. The first elections held in 1951-1952, thus became infamous for disenfranchising 28 lakh women. This alone paints a picture of the scale and magnitude of the chasm in the politicization of women in democratic India.

By 1957, peer pressure saw 94% of all eligible female voters registered with due details in place. Nevertheless, women’s voting percentage was in its 40s, with a nearly 17% gap against men in 1962. Lodged in the 50s, all the way up until 2009, it was the 2014 Lok Sabha churn that saw a narrowing of the gap against men to under 2% points.

Finally in the most recent 2019 General Elections, it soared ahead of men’s voting percentage by a sliver of 0.17% points. This photo finish took focused efforts from the Election Commission of India that ran voter registration and awareness camps for women, separated male and female queues at the booths, operated female-only voting booths, among other measures. A whole host of non-state organizations pitched in to raise awareness and enlist voters. The growth of female literacy over the decades also brought women to the polling booths.

In addition, political parties played a seminal role with their voter enlistment drives. There were 53 parties fighting the first Lok Sabha elections and today for the 17th Lok Sabha elections the number has burgeoned to 2293. While the vast majority of them come a cropper, hundreds have seen varying degrees of success across state and national elections in these seven and a half decades, and their voter recruitment drives benefit them electorally, even as they increase women’s voting percentage. Up to this first milestone in the trajectory, political parties viewed women as voters and only voters. Soon they expanded their scope to women as mobilizers of the vote, realizing that women are door openers to get out the vote, while strange men going door to door turn off people.

The next milestone for political parties was of women as vote banks. They earned the women’s vote through welfare schemes rather than manifesto promises, which are ephemeral. Women voters exacted their price, ahead of their endorsement.

M.G. Ramachandran, erstwhile Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu’s All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) was the progenitor of the women’s vote bank. He earned it through his state-run Noon Meal Scheme in the late ’70s that delivered an increase in children’s school enrolments by alleviating hunger. Subsequently, erstwhile Chief Minister N.T. Rama Rao of the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh implemented a slew of schemes for economic rights of women, including amending the Hindu succession laws for an equal share of inheritance and, reservation in government jobs. Also, J. Jayalalithaa of the AIADMK, cultivated a dedicated female vote back through her health and economic welfare schemes for girls and women.

Parties in Odisha, West Bengal, and Bihar have since employed similar tactics, delivering benefits to women before requisitioning their loyalty. The trajectory that began with a singular view of women as voters, progressed to women as mobilizers of votes, and then as a significant vote bank in several states.

The next phase was the deployment
of women in election rallies, albeit minimally. Women were being enrolled in political parties since before Independence and masses of them led their own protests. However, in India’s electoral democracy, they were ‘used’ in electoral rallies, sparsely and symbolically. As MP Kanimozhi of the DMK said to Shakti, ‘Nobody wants you there. Nobody wants to see you or hear you. They need to show some colour for the vote, so they have you sit in the back.’

Women are solicited by political parties to join their women’s wings in large numbers, in order to exude an aura of inclusivity and cross-demographic momentum. Public visibility of party-women en masse is only when the Women’s Wings, as opposed to the
main party, organize issue-based events. The journey of political parties brought them to the point where women are seen as active electoral campaign aides, though in small measure and tactically, and not just as voters, or passive recipients of campaigns.

In 1999, there were a couple of oddball bumps. The TDP Chief Minister Chandra Babu Naidu announced 50 female candidates of 269 (18.5%) for the Andhra Pradesh state elections. For the General Elections at the same time, the Congress announced 16% female nominations. However, those remained one-off data points without extension either within or beyond those parties for a decade. Meanwhile, civil society threw up women’s movements calling for greater devolution of political power
to women. The first wave that campaigned for the Women’s Reservation Bill were affiliated with the Left parties or the Congress while the current crop, including Shakti, Netri,
and others, are non-partisan groups exerting pressure on political parties.

Grasping this responsiveness of political parties to voter pressure, Shakti released a WhatsApp friendly short film of less than 90 seconds for voter consumption ahead of the Bihar elections in 2020. It was later voiced over for the West Bengal, Assam and Tamil Nadu elections. The film conveys the lacunae in governance due to the lack of women with stark visuals that urges voters to assert their right to balanced legislatures.

Back to political parties, there seems to be a spurt of women on the ballot since 2010. The JD(U) fielding 17-19% female candidates twice since the 2010 Bihar state elections. The AITC standing 14-41% women since 2011, thrice in West Bengal state elections and twice in the General Elections. The BJD followed suit in 2019 with 33% women on the ballot. Most recently, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, General Secretary of the INC, announced that 40% of their candidates for the upcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in India, would be female. The trajectory that commenced with a lonely notion of women as voters soon journeyed to women as mobilizers, who drive votes beyond their own and now recognizes them as vote banks.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s campaign strategy in Uttar Pradesh is a peep into the next potential transformation. Women run women dominated electoral campaigns. Many female candidates across parties have had more women in their campaigns and attracted more women in the audience than their male counterparts, but India has not seen women as the mainstay of electoral campaigns.

It is today the theme in the Congress campaign in Uttar Pradesh – campaigns of, for and by women. Rallies entirely filled with women, messaging tailored for women, girls’ marathons, press conferences entirely delivered by women, a manifesto solely for women and the campaign plank dominated by governance issues, gendered appropriately. While it is too early and too little to dub this as transformative, it is a marked divergence from run of the mill testosterone-pumped electoral campaigns.

Nine times in a span of eleven years, across two parties, the JD(U) and the AITC, and spreading to two more, the BJD and the INC, women have been sent to the fray at significantly higher rates by mainstream parties in large states – too many instances to be dismissed as aberrations. What is noteworthy though, is that they have not resulted from laws on electoral gender-justice or audits by ombudsmen. While voters in India have not been parochial about electing women, the win rate of women in the Lok Sabha elections time and again has superseded that of men; they have not shamed parties for their brazen sidelining of women either. Voters have embraced nearly all-male legislatures without embarrassment.

This cadence could potentially have augured a tectonic shift had the decisions on increasing women’s electoral capacities emanated from party rulebooks or policies. That would have signalled institutional transformation. Unfortunately, what is evident is that much of the munificence stems from three key co-ordinates: the propensities of the woman/man at the helm, aka, the party leader, electoral calculus on the female vote bank and organizational power play.

The women’s vote bank inherited seamlessly from M.G. Ramachandran to J. Jayalalithaa of the AIADMK was a deliberate electoral calculus. Thelegatees of the AITC, BJD and the JD(U) are all unknown. The absence of institutional mechanisms makes it impossible to predict whether the feminization of the ballot by this trium-virate will outlast the trio themselves. In the Congress, it is even more apparent that it is one leader’s diktat or experiment in one state. The party establishment across other states does not toe the line.

Mapping myriad data points and Shakti’s experiences, we can assert with confidence that the rise of women as electoral players is not derived from the transformation of political party organizational structures, or from institutional support, regulatory frameworks, or a moral compass for gender justice. What is causing this transformation of party behaviour is, in fact, the women themselves. It is women as a vote bank, rooted firmly on a bed of delivered governance benefits who are exerting irresistible pressure on political parties. In that sense, the ongoing feminization of electoral politics in
India is a quintessentially a democratic phenomenon: blocs of voters moulding the decisions of political parties.