Parties queue up to woo women voters in battle for Uttar Pradesh

Women-centric campaigns and sops are being announced as parties try to garner votes amid a rise in the number of women voters

With the share of women voters in Uttar Pradesh gradually increasing, there has been a subtle shift in how the parties are viewing the role of this segment in the Hindi heartland this poll season.

Struggling long to regain lost ground in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress is experimenting with evolving women as its vote bank and has taken the lead by announcing that it will give 40 per cent tickets to them.

Priyanka Gandhi, whose electioneering is centred around women's issues, recently recalled the iconic dialogue from Bollywood movie Deewar to counter critics that her party had lost base in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh, saying, "Mere Paas Behen Hai" (I have my sister).

The Congress' list of women candidates includes the names of actor-activist Sadaf Jafar, who was arrested during the anti-citizenship law protests in Lucknow in December 2019, and the mother of Unnao rape victim, whose family has long fought against the alleged harassment of then BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar.

Others figuring in the Congress list of women nominees are Poonam Pandey, an Asha worker from Shahjahanpur who was allegedly roughed up while demanding an increase in honorarium, and Ritu Singh from Muhammadi seat in Lakhimpur Kheri, a former SP worker who was manhandled in broad daylight to stop her from filing nomination for panchayat elections.

Also Read — UP Elections: Will Priyanka's 'women card' fetch votes?

Reaching out to this segment of voters, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 21 had transferred Rs 1,000 crore to bank accounts of self-help groups to benefit around 16 lakh women. The programme in Prayagraj had seen the participation of over two lakh women.

The BJP has given a ticket to Aditi Singh, the Congress turncoat from Rae Bareli Sadar seat.

The Samajwadi Party, which has adopted the new tag line "Nai hawa hai, Nai SaPa hai', has recently sought to give new meaning to its M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) formula, which had catapulted it to power in Uttar Pradesh. "In the new SP, M-Y stands for Mahila (women) and youth. We are addressing issues in a larger perspective now and are not shackled by casteism," SP chief Akhilesh Yadav had stated in an informal interaction with reporters recently.

The Samajwadi Party has fielded former minister Gayatri Prasad Prajapati's wife Maharaji Devi from Amethi, and Pooja Shukla, the student activist who had shown a black flag to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, from Lucknow (north) assembly seat.

Prajapati and two others were sentenced to life imprisonment in a 2017 rape case.

Though led by a woman leader, the BSP has never stressed a separate campaign for mobilising women voters, but has lately been concentrating on its social engineering formula which had brought it to power on its own in 2007.

Also Read — A brief history of women in UP polls

According to the Election Commission office, enrolment of women in large numbers during the revision of electoral rolls has led to an improvement in the gender ratio by 11 points from 857 against 1000 male voters on November 1, 2021, to 868 on December 5.

The Commission has released the voter's list of Uttar Pradesh, which has over 8.04 crore male voters (8,04,52,736) and over 6.98 crore women voters (6,98,22,416). The Commission has also launched a programme to increase the participation of women in voting for increasing the voting percentage in the state.

In the previous elections, a record 40 women candidates had made it to the Uttar Pradesh assembly, the highest ever proportion of women members in the 403-member House.

All the major political parties together had fielded 96 women of which BJP and its junior partner Apna Dal, which swept the polls, got the highest number of 35 women representatives elected followed by two winners each in the BSP and Congress and one woman candidate from the Samajwadi Party

In 2012, 35 women were elected, which was the earlier record.

According to the Election Commission data, in the first UP assembly election after Independence in 1952, 20 women were elected. Even after that their presence in the House has remained insignificant.

In 1985, 31 women were elected but the number fell to 18 in 1989, and further nosedived to 10 in 1991. In 1993, 14 women were elected, a number which increased to 20 in 1996 and 26 in 2002. In 2007, however, their number fell to three.

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