Making their presence felt

WOMEN AS A CONSTITUENCY

With the successful implementation of prohibition of liquor in Bihar, not only has there been a break on growing alcoholism and a liquor-propelled political economy but more importantly, what one is getting to witness in our democracy is the creation of women as a distinct constituency, with distinct demands of their own. 

Women have been active as voters all through post-independence history but rarely did they have distinct demands of their own, and more importantly, they were considered to be voting more around the preference of their families and male counterparts. 

It is perhaps for the first time that with a string of states, such as Kerala, and Tamil Nadu in the pipeline, considering the possibility of prohibiting liquor that women are making their presence felt as a distinct constituency with demands and a view-point of their own.  This would have long-term impact in the way we understand the configurations of electoral politics alongside caste, religion and region. 

Electoral politics was dominated by caste and religious configurations and women were a sub-set subsumed under these larger social grids. Women were known to raise and mobilised for issues such as price rise or occasionally lead social struggles against sexual violence, which did not necessarily turn into electoral constituency to impact the voting patterns. Even if women’s issues were addressed as a tokenism, they did not assume the proportion that they seem to be taking in the current phase. 

In Bihar, with the implementation of prohibition causing a revenue loss of up to Rs 3,000 crore, women have put down a stamp of long term impact on electoral politics by emerging as a relatively stable vote bank that would influence electoral outcomes in a decisive manner. This process began in Andhra Pradesh in 1992 with women leading the way and forcing the then government led by Telugu Desam Party under N T Rama Rao’s leadership prohibit liquor. 

Women then had linked consumption of liquor with distress, debt, and domestic violence. They promised to vote to a party that would take this bold move. However, after a couple of years, prohibition was lifted and the voice women had gathered frittered away. 

This process, in a somewhat quite manner, is underway in places like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, which have been sites of various kinds of violence against women. In Haryana, if it’s the khap panchayats, in UP, women were the worst affected during communal riots. Here, women began to speak across caste and religion and began to realise that either way they are the worst affected. Khap’s order of rape as a punishment for inter-caste marriages or social boycott as legitimate punishments, while women belonging to both Hindu and Muslim communities become the first victims of organised violence. 

If this ‘silent revolution’ fructifies, it would initiate a new kind of a dialogue on the religion and caste-based mobilisations and the way much of it is linked to the idea of community honour hinging on social and sexual control of women. 

This process is also visible in the way the recent Supreme Court order asked for women to be allowed into the Shani temple, and the way RSS and other social organisations have supported this demand demonstrate the importance of now underscoring the presence of women in public spaces but also as part of electoral calculations. 

The issue of the entry of women in Shani temple would have some impact on an impending demand for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in the days to come. It would be interesting to wait and watch if women, especially from Muslim communities, would play a larger and distinct role in the way the debate on UCC will play out this time around, different from the days of Shah Bano. 

If women from across religions are able to muster a voice of their own, distinct from their community leaders, this might impact not only the way religion will come to be perceived in public spaces but also begin to raise larger questions about the interface between religion and gender cutting across religious divides, which in turn would have important fallout for the possibility of communal polarisation and the way we understand caste in times to come.

Caste and gender

In fact, as part of anti-caste mobilisation, both Jyothiba Phule and Ambedkar always emphasised the inextricable link between caste and gender. Both felt much of caste is actually about gendered practices in order to gain control over the sexuality of the so-called lower caste women. 

Phule began school for both caste-Hindu women as well as dalit and referred to both as shudraatishudra. Ambedkar too drew this link in arguing that it’s only women and dalits who experience untouchability - dalits in being spatially and socially ostracised and women during their menstrual cycles - are physically segregated from the rest of the family members. 

It is this vision that can now be possibly recovered from women emerging as a distinct constituency in electoral dynamics. For women’s issues to be foregrounded its imperative that caste and religious control is undermined. This tussle that was partial and sporadic might now assume more substantive and long-term proportions. 

Women as voters now cannot be delimited to mere populist measures of offering sewing machines and colour television sets but raise more substantive political-economy demands as a distinct electoral constituency. Alongside this the impending issue of 33% reservation for women in parliament might assume more serious proportions, which would only further add fillip to this process of a distinct politics. 

This, however, cannot be construed as a revolutionary step that is going to set aside caste and religion but what it can do is raise new issues and bring forth new frames as to how and why women of all castes, religions and regions become victims of physical and sexual violence in cases of conflicts. There is a distinct structure that works across these social configurations. This perspective in itself is a step forward in Indian democracy.

(The writer teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)