India’s women reservation: Kill bill or time to close the gender-democratic deficit?

Why the Bill matters

 As part of its of women-led development, it is imperative that India brings the long-awaited Constitutional Amendment Bill, that seeks to reserve one-third of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies, to its logical end.

Globally, women’s political engagement lags behind that of men, with the gender gap in participation varying across geographies over time. According to a report by the Inter Parliamentary Union, which compiles global data on national parliaments worldwide, women made up for only 26.5 percent of parliamentarians on 1 January 2023 in single or lower houses, clocking a year-on year increase of only 0.4 percentage points—the slowest growth in six years. Data collated by the same report ranks India at 143 out of 187 countries, with only 15.2 percent women’s representation in the lower house and 13.8 percent in the upper houses of parliament, as of July 2023.  It is estimated that there are only 31 countries that have 34 women serving as Heads of State/Government, which pushes back gender equality in the highest echelons of power by another 130 years. Clearly, this rate of progress will not be sufficient to achieve gender parity before 2063 and indicates that more needs to be done.

It is estimated that there are only 31 countries that have 34 women serving as Heads of State/Government.

The participatory inclusion and leadership of women in the electoral processes of a country is a key indicator of its democratic wellbeing as well as its efficacy. Despite India’s constitutional promulgation of 1952, which strives to secure to all its citizens “justice—social, economic and political” and “equality of status and of opportunity,” women still remain pariahs in the political arena. The transforming landscape of women’s electoral participation, however, offers some hope but, a lot still needs to be achieved to bridge the gender-political deficit. In this context, it is perhaps imperative to examine the gender gap through three major verticals: i) women as voters in parliament, ii) women as electoral candidates and iii) as representatives in legislatures.

According to reports, the gender gap between male to female voter turnout has not only closed but reversed 0.17 percentage points in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from a minus 16.71 points in the 1962 general polls. Another report stated that the number of registered voters for the 2019 elections was 438,491,517 as compared to 397,049,094 for the 2014 elections, increasing the gender ratio to a historic 930 in 2018 as compared to 908 in 2014. The gender turnout in 2009, 2014 and 2019—as depicted in Table 1—shows increasing gender parity in voter turnout between men and women, indicating the rising presence of women in the electoral process.

Table 1: In 2019, men and women are at par in terms of voter turnout

This is not just an increase in female voter turnout but an exercise in their discretion of political thought spurring a ‘silent revolution of self-empowerment’ as shown in the Table 2 below:

Source: National Election Studies, CSDS Data Unit

On the other hand the percentage of women contesting as candidates has marginally increased from 6.11 percent from the 1999 Lok Sabha elections to only around 9 percent as shown in Table 3.

Table 3- Women Contestants in Lok Sabha Elections, 2004-2019

Source- India Today’s Data Intelligence Unit’s Compilation from Election Commission of India Dataset

Despite the fact that 78 women were elected to the lower house in 2019—out of 543 members—which marked the country’s highest proportion of female leadership in its political history, yet there is unfinished business as reflected in Table 4. Women continue to be underrepresented in legislative bodies in most of the states across India, which was slightly below the 15 percent mark indicating women’s exclusion from fair electoral participation.

 Table 4: Percentage of Women elected to the State Legislative Assemblies

Source: Ministry of Law & Justice, GoI 2022

As shown as in Table 4, the states of Mizoram and Nagaland draw a blank in terms of women’s political leadership in 2018 in spite of high rates in female literacy—89.9 per cent and 76.1 respectively as per the 2011 census of India. This indicates that the political environment can affect gendered patterns of political behaviour as most educated women in Mizoram fail to consider politics as a clean career option. In 2023, Nagaland, on the other hand, went on to create history of sorts as two women went on to bag the assembly polls in the state 60 years after it attained Statehood.

The participation of women in the Rajya Sabha has been particularly abysmal, recording a decline of 12.76 percent in 2014 to 10.33 percent in 2020 as shown in the table below.

Table 5 Share of seats held by women in Rajya Sabha in India from 2014 to 2020

Source:- Statista.com

These contestations in academic discourse over the participation of women in India’s electoral landscape from a gendered lens can be then viewed from two broad perspectives. Structural norms often impede women’s full participation in the political field; if women lack political voice and have poor representation, it is a result of decades of gender discrimination and societal exclusion (Agarwal 2006[i]).  Societal prejudices are then carried over by political parties not only in terms of allotment of seats but also within the party pecking order. Political analysts have often argued that the political field then unfolds as a zero-sum game, which limits women’s opportunities as contestants and winners in parliamentary and state assembly elections. Women also lack positions of authority and influence within political networks and also tend to be less well known barring those from dynastic and celebrity backgrounds.

Structural norms often impede women’s full participation in the political field; if women lack political voice and have poor representation.

The long walk to the ballot box: Tracing the trajectories of women’s suffrage rights in India

Some of these gains in women’s electoral participation have not come easy, germinating as early as in the Swadeshi Movement (1905-08) in Bengal, which was the genesis of women’s participation in the national struggle. With the National Perspective Plan for Women in 1988 demanding the introduction of a 30 per cent quota for women in all elective bodies, a national consensus resulted in the adoption of the 73^rd and 74^th amendments to the Constitution in 1993, which finally instituted a 33 percent reservation for women in local governance.

Since 1995, demands for a constitutional amendment bill that aimed to reserve one-third of seats for women in Parliament met without any national consensus despite being introduced in 1998, 1999, 2008  and again in 2010, dying out with the exit of subsequent serving regimes. But a remarkable trend can be observed from a compilation of data from between 1957-2019—women have won at a greater rate than men in every Lok Sabha poll as shown in Table 5.

TABLE 5: Percentage of Male and Female Winnings in Lok Sabha Elections, 1957-2019

Source: The Wire 2020

Looking ahead to foot the bill

 The pace of women’s political representation has unfortunately been despite higher levels of education, political awareness and employment, mainly because societies at large have kept their patriarchal arrangements intact. But a window of opportunity is opening up to close this gap that needs to be urgently translated into reality in the upcoming special parliamentary session. The advantages of seat reservation for women are many; they can act on the ways that political parties steer and engage in their recruitment processes (Krook)[1]. Political parties would then find it profitable to offer women access to resources in financing their campaigns, and securing safe workplaces, mentorship and training by placing them in winnable positions.

 As gatekeepers of the world’s largest democracy, political parties should now ensure that they adopt an inclusive and gender sensitive approach to accelerate the pace of change that fortify women’s agency in governance and leadership. Political parties should begin to exercise some thought about allocating the requisite number of party tickets to women without falling back into the vicious circle of tokenistic or dynastic politics. And there are many examples around the world where women representatives have gained from efforts to advocate gender mainstreaming processes in their legislatures, such as Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Rwanda, the United Arab Emirates  and New Zealand.

Reviving the languishing Women’s Reservation Bill is paramount to women’s political empowerment,  and parties must arrive at a consensus on issues—whether considering a sub quota for minority groups within this quota for women, or if seats should be reserved on a rotational basis. If the Bill is sacrificed one more time, it will regress to what The Indian Franchise Committee report of 1932 had stated, “unless special provision is made for women, it seems improbable that more than a few, if any, women will secure election to the first legislatures even with a larger women’s electorate than we are able to propose, considering the prejudice which still exists in India against women taking part in public life”.

Arundhatie Biswas is a Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.

[1]  Mona Lena Krook, “Competing Claims: Quotas for Women and Minorities in India and France” (presented at the European Consortium for Political Research, Budapest, September 8-10th 2005