EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Ofor Women’ forms one of the five components of its 2024 election manifesto. Under it, two big promises stand out. First, an annual Rs 1 lakh cash transfer, paid in monthly instalments, to the bank account of the eldest woman in every poor family under the Mahalakshmi scheme. Second, 50 per cent reservation for women in all central government jobs. Clearly, the Grand Old Party is keenly aware that its entitlement-led campaign is what helped it win Karnataka and Telangana last year. That had included simple expedients like free bus tickets to women. ur society often puts a bar on open and equal gender participation in the processes of democracy, even though the Constitution of India had granted women equal franchise rights at the dawn of the Republic. But this has been changing radically, in part due to the rising rate of female literacy, the greater space accorded to gender equality at the Panchayati Raj level, the self-help group movement and, in recent years, the growing availability of information due to the mobile revolution. Women’s participation in the electoral process over the past decade has, therefore, been throwing up data that’s truly historic. In 2019, for the first time ever in national elections, a higher percentage of the female electorate exercised their franchise than the male side—67.18 per cent out of the pool of 438.5 million registered women voters, against only 67.02 per cent of the men. It was a tiny gap of 0.16 percentage points, but a giant leap for womankind. Statistics do reveal the revolutionary change that is unfolding on the ground. Take the lens away from national to state elections, and you see that the greater desire to participate is not an aberration but a consistent trend. Of the 23 major states that held elections in the five years till 2023, the female turnout was higher in as many as 18. The gender ratio of our electorate, or the number of females per 1,000 males among registered voters, too is moving fast towards a level playing field: there has been a 7.5 per cent rise among women electors this election, taking their total number up to 471.5 million now. Registered male voters have risen only by five per cent to 497.2 million. With that, the overall elector gender ratio has improved from 926:1,000 in 2019 to 948:1,000 this election. That includes 8.5 million first-time women voters (those who have reached voting age). Indian women are clearly becoming equal arbiters of the nation’s political destiny. Sukanya Ganguly, 31, an IT consultant in Kolkata, could well be speaking for the entire sorority when she says, “I must vote if I want the country to be a better, more equal and just place for women to live in.” This greater share in the franchise has had a perceptible impact on electoral outcomes. In fact, the decade-long dominance of the Narendra Modi dispensation over Indian politics is partly attributable to female voting preferences. From the time Modi strode on to centre stage in 2014, it was a tangible trend. In the 2019 general election, as many as 46 per cent of women voters chose the BJP compared to only 44 per cent of the men, according to an analysis of voting patterns by polling agency Axis-My India. This was not a one-way trac of adulation. Data from SBI Research shows that women have a significant share in the Modi government’s central schemes. They account for as much as 68 per cent of all MUDRA loans. Expand the acronym MUDRA to its full form—Micro Units Development & Refinance Agency— and you know which sector of the economy is being benefited. It also tells you the kind of creative role that women are playing in the non-corporate, non-farm micro-enterprise universe, and how politics is entwined with economics. Similarly, more than 81 per cent of Stand-up India’s footprint is female. Policies attuned to women from across the political spectrum o£er concrete proof that this is a much sought-after segment of the electorate. The Congress, on its part, is waging its own battle of guarantees to woo the women’s vote. ‘Nari Nyay’ or ‘Justice
This is quite reminiscent of the welfare line of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, who had inaugurated this kind of outreach in the mid-2000s by o£ering money to buy bicycles to female students who had passed Class 8. That was a scheme that came to be emulated by many other states. From that primary mobility, India is fast reaching the next stage of economic mobility. State governments have often taken the lead in this aspect of gender outreach too. Former Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s hugely popular Ladli Behna scheme played a critical role in deciding last year’s assembly election outcome in his state. The ‘Modi Ki Guarantees’ in the BJP manifesto this time include a massive scheme to empower 30 million rural women to become Lakhpati Didis. Executive Editor Manisha Saroop and Senior Associate Editor Jumana Shah perform a gender audit of the ongoing election for our cover story this week. ¦§¨¦© ª«¨©¬ correspondents spoke with women across the country—young and old, rural and urban, working women and housewives—to find out what they want. And they discovered that women want more than just scheme after scheme. Bread-and-butter issues matter to them as much as they a£ect the men. The lack of access to education and employment is a recurrent theme in their conversations, and the pinch of high prices matters too. While the closing of the gender gap in voter turnouts is a welcome sign, the gender gap in everything else remains a stark reality. Women’s representation remains dismal. They constituted only 15 per cent of the 17th Lok Sabha. And even in this election, at the end of three phases, only 358 women had stepped into the electoral fray out of a total of 4,175 candidates, a deplorable 8.6 per cent. Women’s empowerment needs more than just stated intent to become a reality. The Modi government’s landmark Constitution (106th Amendment) Act 2023, which reserves one-third of all seats for women in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, is quite the transformative legislation here. Fulfilling a decades-long demand from women politicians and activists, it promises to reset the very grammar and vocabulary of Indian politics upon implementation. The Congress, in fact, promises only to expedite it. Clearly, amid all the mutual rancour and competition, there is a silent political consensus. One that recognises the centrality of women’s political participation and why it is essential for India to be regarded as a great democracy.