Priyanka Gandhi: Yet to write her own ticket in politics

Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s recent promise that 40% of the party’s candidates in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections would be women was greeted — as such dramatic announcements are — with approbation. It would set the tone for the UP polls and might even upset the primacy of caste, many commentators gushed, even as they stressed that it would remind the major political parties about their long overdue promise to reserve a third of the seats in Parliament and the state assemblies for women.Others cautioned that this may not necessarily be the gamechanger that the Congress needs in UP.

While Priyanka Gandhi’s assurance is certainly welcome, its outcome is yet to be seen. What the announcement has done, however, is to once again bring focus to the poor representation of women in the country’s politics. This, despite the fact that Mahatma Gandhi encouraged the equal participation of women in the freedom struggle.

With the enactment of the Constitution, all women had the right to vote and contest elections. Yet, today, 75 years after Independence, India ranks 140 among 156 countries on women’s political representation in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index 2021. As far as the political empowerment sub-index goes, India ranks 51, dropping from 18 in 2019.

In India, far too much gets obscured by the fact that the country has had a woman Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, a woman in Rashtrapati Bhawan, Pratibha Patil, and a string of impressive party presidents — from Sonia Gandhi to Mayawati, J Jayalalithaa, Mehbooba Mufti, Mamata Banerjee and even a Union Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman.

If Congress President Sonia Gandhi presided over the party’s fortunes when the party was in power between 2004 and 2014, Mayawati and Jayalalithaa were chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu respectively for more than one term and Mehbooba was CM of Jammu and Kashmir for a truncated tenure. Mamata, the current toast of Opposition politics, is into her third term as CM of West Bengal.

And yet, despite a large number of women being at the helm of a range of parties, they still get short-changed, with a majority boxed into women's units. They are also in an overwhelming minority in the decision-making bodies of the political parties — in working committees, national executives or politburos. Consequently, in the governments that are formed both at the Centre and in the states, women rarely get top portfolios.

The Modi government did assign the portfolio of the Minister of External Affairs to the late Sushma Swaraj. Nirmala Sitharaman has the distinction of having headed the Defence and Finance Ministries. However, it is apparent that only two people are of any consequence when it comes to making policy decisions — Prime Minister Modi himself and Home Minister Amit Shah.

Reservation

A quarter of a century after H D Deve Gowda’s United Front government proposed that a third of the seats in all the legislatures be reserved for women, the country does not seem closer to seeing this becoming an Act in Parliament. Possibly as a consequence, post-1996, there has been an incremental rise in the number of women who were elected to the Lok Sabha. Between 1951 to 1996, in a span of 45 years, this number had increased from 22 to 40. Compared to this, in just 21 years between 1998 to 2019, the number of women in Lok Sabha has gone up from 43 to 79. Despite the increase, this is clearly nowhere near equitable in a house of 542 members.

A clearer picture of the status of women in politics emerges from a close study of the 79 women MPs, who constitute 14.58% of the total membership of current Lok Sabha. As many as 43 are from political families, with either a father or husband in politics, in some rare cases, a mother or father-in-law; seven are widows of former legislators. Of the remaining 36, seven are medical doctors, seven actresses, two members of the erstwhile royalty, two are former civil servants and two are saffron preachers.

Just a little over a quarter of women who were elected — only 22 — have risen from the ranks. These women started out either as elected Zilla Panchayat or municipal ward members, mayors, MLAs, state ministers, party functionaries or from student politics.

A shining example in this cohort is that of 72-year-old Pramila Bisoi, a Biju Janata Dal MP who won Odisha’s Aska with a margin of two lakh votes, a constituency once held by state Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. A child bride who studied only up to Class 3, Bisoi gained immense popularity as a representative for Mission Shakti, a self-help group for women in Odisha.

At the grassroots

In 1992, elections to Panchayats with gender quotas were instituted with the passage of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act. By 2020, twenty states had upped their quotas to ensure that half the seats in the Panchayati Raj Institutions were filled by women. Confirming this, the Union Minister of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Narendra Singh Tomar told the Rajya Sabha in September 2020, that as many as 14,53,973 elected women had positions in the Panchayats. For a start, this should provide political parties with a huge pool of women to choose as functionaries or candidates in elections.

However, the fact remains that only women from political families or with political patronage have an easy ride. Even well-educated urban women have to claw their way up in what remains a boy’s club. For women from small towns or villages who have political ambitions, the climb is much harder.

Women still face sexist remarks regularly about their appearance, clothing and experience. Even prominent leaders like Mamata had to deal with sexist slurs during the recent West Bengal elections.

On social media, derogatory comments about women in politics are plentiful. An Amnesty International report in 2019 detailed the abuse Indian female politicians are subjected to on Twitter. Indeed, daily sexism and worse, sexual harassment are, perhaps, the weapons that male politicians use to ensure that politics remains a bastion of male privilege. Women can breach this citadel only by fighting this battle collectively.

(Smita Gupta is a journalist and political commentator)