Polls Apart: Can Women Bring the Swing Vote This Election?

The vote is especially precious to women because we are entrenched in democracy by the principle, and legacy of, suffrage.

(Photo: PTI)  

The vote is especially precious to women because we are entrenched in democracy by the principle, and legacy of, suffrage.

During a recent drive to the airport in Kolkata, I chanced upon a billboard with an urban Bengali woman’s countenance. She looked strong and resilient, like India’s answer to Rosie the Riveter, clad in the quintessential sari and sindoor.

The copy on the hoarding read something to the effect of, “I lost my vote when I got married*.” I then had an ignorant bourgeois moment when I thought, “Does that still happen in India?” making me curious about what a woman’s vote really means to her.

The Individualisation of the Indian Woman Voter

The vote is among the most cherished civic liberties to the Indian mind. It is one of those things that makes India a “great nation”. We are wantonly anti-incumbent, having dismissed personality cults and precipitous coalitions over the years, as our own backyard has fallen prey to military coups and lifetime presidents. Polymath Ramachandra Guha has often spoken about how India is “not so much an electoral democracy, as much as an elections-only democracy.”

Suffrage has a hundred-odd year history in India, pioneered by the provinces of Madras and Bombay in the early 1920s. Despite scepticism from the British sahebs, Independent India remained committed to universal adult franchise. From 1947 to 1950, the Election Commission took on the mammoth task of preparing the country’s first-voter lists, which were finalised well before 26 January 1950 – the date on which the Constitution was signed. As historian Dr Ornit Shani astutely observes, “Indians became voters before they became citizens.”

Initially, 2.8 million ‘nameless’ women had to be struck off the first electoral rolls. While enrolling to vote, some women had identified themselves as the wife, daughter, or even widow, ‘of’ a male relative, rather than by their own names.

India’s administrators were adamant that voter rights would apply to independents and individuals only. This was far removed from the colonial bureaucratic belief that "a woman's name should be removed from the electoral roll if she is divorced, or if her husband dies, or loses his property."

Women Belong in the (Parliament) House

After a long impasse with historical circumstances, the pan-India gender gap in voter turnout has narrowed from 15 percent in 1962 to 1.5 percent in 2014. Female voter turnouts have touched 80 percent and upwards in most north-eastern states and UTs, with women outvoting men in 16 states and UTs, including electorate-heavy Tamil Nadu and Bihar.

Recognising the torrent in female franchise, political parties are now vying for the body politic. This often results in hit-and-trial tactics to target an amorphous women vote bank, begging the question: is there really a woman vote bank?

Women, like every demographic in India, are far from a monolithic electoral constituency. I would venture to say that if “women” could be categorised as a voter base, it would perhaps be the most complex and multi-dimensional bloc in India, where intersectional lines run deep. This arising circumstance of “minorities within minorities” – sub-quotas for minority groups within the women’s quota – has hamstrung the consensus needed to reserve a third of seats for female representatives in the lower house and legislative assemblies.

This concept seems slightly absurd, because regardless of ethnicity, geography or income, women remain sub-minorities within minorities in India. To further pit women at different levels of the social pyramid against each other is to ignore the fact that all hierarchies are fundamentally patriarchal.

An oft cited tactic to improve gender equity in political representation is the reservation of seats within parties to field more women candidates, especially in constituencies reserved for SCs and STs. The calculus of faith and caste continues to trump gender in the government’s policy of appeasement, and more divisively, the deeper contours of sects and sub-castes.

This became apparent when Malayali women of all ‘menstrual ages’ formed a statewide human chain to uphold their legal right to enter the Sabarimala temple, while god-fearing brahmanical women took to the streets to protest against it. Political parties across the spectrum did no favours to society’s evolution towards universal rights and away from ritualistic rites, schizophrenically toggling from nari shakti to sanskari.

Our government’s soft-pedalling on women’s rights over caste-based privileges was evident when an affirmative action bill for ‘economically weaker’ upper-castes was passed almost overnight in the outgoing houses of parliament.

Over a decade of prevarication on the women’s quota Bill has resulted in a parliament where women are conspicuous by their absence, representing only 11.8 percent of members of across the bicameral house.

An ostensibly egalitarian argument against the Bill suggests that biwi-beti-bahu nexuses will emerge as a result of reservation. This status-quoist hypocrisy is blatant in a political system in which dynastic succession is writ large among the gatekeepers, or rather chowkidars, of Sansad Bhawan.

As is wont to do before the polls, the Bill has been exhumed again, with politicians waxing poetic their plans for it. One cannot predict its course till parliament is in session this summer, but the tragedy remains: seventy years after independence, women leaders still require reservation. The pace of women representation in the government has been glacial – with less than one member a year joining parliament since its first session in 1952.

Women Vote for Women

Liberal, democratic, and left-of-centre parties tend to enjoy the gender advantage, as women’s issues are often subsumed within the discourse of human and minority rights. In India, this has been reflected in women voters’ preference towards regional parties in both national and state elections. As a new knit of Dalit-Muslim-OBC unity emerges, it is likely that women could become a key constituency in states like Uttar Pradesh and Telangana.

Even in an elections-only democracy, there is a symbiosis between the elector and the elected. Studies have shown that women tend to cast the ballot for women-led parties, especially in regions where there is higher gender parity among voters, such as south India.

The performance of parties led by Mehbooba Mufti (People’s Democratic Party in Jammu & Kashmir) to Mayawati (Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh) and Mamata Banerjee (Trinamool Congress in West Bengal) has been cited as testament to this.

This is simply because women are likely to have a better understanding of what women want. While the government pats itself on the back for providing women with gas cylinders and toilets – not futile causes, but relegate women to purely the domestic sphere – the National Alliance of Women's Organisations’ Womanifesto for 2019 suggests some common denominators of what universal demands for gender-equal welfare could look like.

These include free treatment of rape and acid attack survivors in government hospitals, free provision of sanitary napkins to girl students, and interestingly, the reservation of 50 percent seats for women in newly constituted ‘peace committees’ in the Home and Foreign ministries, an experiment with the correlation between women in power and peace-building.

What remains is that ‘women’ are a complex, heterogeneous demographic, and this election has become a time for self-reflection on what women’s agency really means. How a woman votes depends on what, where, or who she derives her sense of identity from.

A women’s bloc could only become a force to reckon with if India’s myriad women consciously chose to forgo the patriarchal structures of class, caste, and religion that divides them.

India’s rural unemployment crisis could trigger one such eruption – majority of those employed in the informal sector are women, who are especially vulnerable to market headwinds like inflation and automation. As women comprise the critical mass of economic and political minorities in India, their strength in numbers could demand a more equitable society for all.

Not a Fairy-Tale Ending

While elections are a necessary prerequisite for democracy, an elections-only democracy cannot be the silver bullet to gender power parity in India. Fielding more women candidates has not historically always translated into more women winning elections. Quotas for women in panchayats have rarely led to a pipeline of women advancing to state and national assemblies. While India’s first female citizens lost their vote to patrilineal circumstances, women like Rosie on the billboard could lose them to patrilocal ones.

However, a silent revolution is afoot. The Election Commission has taken solid steps towards lowering the gender voter margin in 2019, targeting women at the grassroots in partciular. These include a women’s-only voting centre in every constituency, door-to-door registration of women voters, contact programmes in schools and colleges and outreach through self-help groups and welfare-networks like those of aanganwadis and ASHA workers.

The vote is especially precious to women because we are entrenched in democracy by the principle, and legacy of, suffrage. Universal adult franchise marked our formal rights-based entry into the political system, and once extended to only the married and propertied, it is today an inalienable right of every Indian woman.

The secret ballot is a moment for every woman citizen to exercise her birth-given right to know her own mind and, in effect, her best interests for her own country. It is a voluntary act of self-empowerment.

After our foremothers’ hard-won battle for the vote, even if women choose not to vote en masse, they must not fall prey to voter apathy. Even a vote cast for ‘none of the above’ is better than no vote at all.

*I now recognise this as The Times of India’s ‘Lost Votes’ campaign’.

(Mallika Pal is a policy advocacy specialist in New Delhi. She tweets @mallikapal27. This is a personal blog. Views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses, nor is responsible for them.)