Representation of women, minorities dips: Think tank

NEWDELHI: There has been a marginal decline in women and Muslim representation in the Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh assembly elections, analysis conducted by the New Delhi based Centre for Policy Research (CPR) found.

The think tank together with the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) Dialogue at Ashoka University organized a discussion on the results of the latest batch of assembly elections held in five states — Rajasthan, MP, Chhattisgarh, Mizoram and Telangana.

According to TCPD data, percentage of women candidates who won in Rajasthan declined from 14% in 2013 to 11.6% in 2018.

Women candidates dipped from 13% in 2013 to 8.7% in 2018 in Madhya Pradesh. Chhattisgarh, however, showed a more stable picture.

“The three Hindi belt states (MP, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh) traditionally do better in terms of women representation. What we see in these elections is that the overall representation of women has actually dipped a little,” said Gilles Verniers, assistant professor of political science, Ashoka University, and co-director of TCPD.

“Over the years, there was an increase and improvement of women representation but we know that when parties are faced with very competitive elections they are reticent to what they perceive to be risks by fielding larger number of women candidates,” he added.

Verniers said that they had data on the performance of women candidates that show there is no reason to think that women make weaker candidates than men.

“If we were to churn out data for those women who have been elected, it would show that they were elected with vote share as high as their male counterpart,” Verniers said.

The issue of low representation of minority communities, particularly the Muslims was also brought up.

The percentage of Muslim candidates and MLAs in the Rajasthan assembly elections dipped from 6.5% in 2013 to 2.4% in 2018. CPR attributed the decline to political parties like the Congress, who may have given fewer tickets to Muslim candidates to avoid backlash from Hindutva-inspired voters.

“We see that there has been a dip in Muslim candidates and that sort of confirms this newly adopted strategy of the Congress party to refrain from fielding as many Muslims as they traditionally used to do in a way to avoid having to face some Hindu backlash. No one expects BJP to distribute any tickets to Muslim candidates, so the onus is on the Congress party,” Verniers added.